CYAN JAMES—"Q: ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT DIABETES" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Cyan James', "Q: Are You Concerned About Diabetes"

Q: ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT DIABETES

A: Sugar is more bam per gram than gunpowder but that’s only a 

fact not a feeling 

Kinds of sugar: caster, granulated, pearl, cane, demerara, turbinado, 

muscovado. Sounds like bachata song titles. Juicy entanglement. Ever smelled 

a cane field on fire? Piccolo note of sweet among the whirling pillar of smoke, 

hawks up high to pierce all the mammals on fire rushing the field’s edges. 

It kills kills kills even though it purrs so loud it fills your mouth it’s still a tiger 

in your kitchen. Possible to imagine people as the personified causes of their 

deaths, such as corpses like a row of frosted cakes in frilly white wrappers 

We make it at seven ounces a day per person, 160 pounds per person per year, 

enough to bury us all. How often we say ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘let’s 

celebrate’ with the slow poison of custards, pecan pie, butter biscuits with tea 

Basterdsuiker: what the Dutch called adding molasses. Sugar so prestigious 

when pure, colonists gobbled it until they got black teeth. If they couldn’t buy 

it, they blackened their teeth to appear rich enough (to be giving themselves 

gum rot), and that’s just about everything you need to know about my people.

ABOUT THE POET 

Cyan James holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been 

nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and published in Gettysburg Review, Michigan 

Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, New Mexico Review, Harvard Review, and 

Salon, among others. She also holds a PhD in public-health genetics and works in 

health policy. Currently she is revising a novel about the young women who 

survived the Green River Killer. She loves fiddles, falconry, long road trips, and 

old front porches.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.

ANN-MARIE BLANCHARD—"FIDELITY IS NOT DEAD" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Ann-Marie Blanchard's, "Fidelity Is Not Dead"

FIDELITY IS NOT DEAD

Fidelity’s baby is dead. She named him Bruce 

and he said goodbye, slipped into the toilet, 

stingray resplendent. It hurt. Fidelity scooped 

his jelly body out the bowl and buried him under 

the camelia, placed a brick over his head; a Virgin 

of Guadalupe candle too (even though she’s had it 

with the Virgin). Some women don’t bury their jelly 

babies. Some don’t give them names. Some don’t 

tell anyone they birthed a jelly baby on the weekend. 

Fidelity is not some women. Fidelity tries to trust 

her body again—invites it out for coffee, asks what 

it does for a living; doctors tell her body to try again. 

Fidelity tries to chart her surges, tries to make love 

even though love makes death. People say her dead 

baby is the shade of hope. When did they last birth 

a stingray? Don’t tell Fidelity about hope. Don’t tell 

her about fish oil. Don’t tell her about mystics. Don’t 

tell her to stick needles in her body at strategic points. 

Don’t tell Fidelity she’s thirty-eight, daily. Don’t tell 

her about prayer beads, holy water, wine fasts and 

running fast. Fidelity knows a thing or two about 

quackery. Fidelity prefers boa constrictors to babies, 

falcons to friends, lizards to lovers, horn sharks to hope.

ABOUT THE POET 

Ann-Marie Blanchard teaches poetry and philosophy at The University of Notre 

Dame on the west coast of Australia, having taught writing for a decade at 

universities in the US. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, A Public 

Space, Adroit Journal, Palette Poetry, Meanjin Quarterly, Westerly, Cordite 

Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won The Missouri Review 

Editors’ Prize in Fiction.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.