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.
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