Sugared Water issue no. 008
Autumn 2023

Contributors

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar, Lisa Bren, Caroline Goodwin, Madeline Grigg, Dani Johnson, Kourtney Jones, Ann Hudson, Amy Kinder Moore, Calida Osti, Benny Sisson, Elizabeth Sunflower, Tiffany L. Thomas, AD Tenn, and Loren Walker,

STAFF

Editor : Nicci Mechler
Editorial Assistants : E. Kristen Anderson, Ashley Blake, & Robin Turner
Readers : Sorella Andersen, Henry Christopher, Robin Gow,
Sarah Stockton, Kelly Lynn Thomas, & Jackie Vega

The Dinner party

ann hudson

Dear Judy Chicago,
thank you for bringing
thirty-nine vulvas
to dinner. Are they guests?
Vessels? Repast? Some
look peaceful, some
inscrutable, some like
they’re ready to pick
a fight. Regardless it’s clear
this is a hall of warriors
with no head of the table,
no way to orient my gaze.
Look at these folds,
at this porcelain flesh,
its variation, reticence,
intensity, gloss. Nothing
makes a sound, no muscles
twitch, not even the edges
of the embroidered table runners
flutter. There are no chairs;
these gorgeous settings
welcome no one. This
is what’s radical: not
the plump, furry labia
but the absence
of hospitality. Dear
Judy Chicago, thank you
for eliminating small talk.
I want to duck beneath
the equilateral border
of these tables, lie down
in the midpoint and look up
at the sky, uncooperative
and no help to anyone.

Ann Hudson is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press) and Glow (Next Page Press), a chapbook on radium. Originally from Virginia, Ann lives outside Chicago. She's a senior editor for Rhino.

holy land postcard (11)

chelsea Margaret bodnar

XXXXXXX—

          Forget it, I'm not going out. The new moon hangs
invisible in its omens and miracle cures, and I am unspooling,
uncategorized storm bruised around the mouth and very tired. In
another world, my one-note heartstrings chorus and refrain. The
twinned girls with one set of eyes, blushing. A single body
without any cause for mercy, with something living underneath
the skin. My double sighs and folds in half, drifts back and
makes herself unknown. And I eclipse. Are you listening? I've
tried it on. I've tried to get it out. I'm still holding her up to my
frame when my eyes go white.

—XXXXXXX

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar says "that's literally me" regarding many toxic fictional characters. She is co-editor of the online literary magazine Everything in Aspic and the author of three chapbooks—Basement Gemini (Hyacinth Girl Press), OUR HOME CAN BE A DANGEROUS PLACE (Grey Book Press), and SNOWBOAT TO NOWHERE (Grey Book Press). Her poetry can be found in numerous publications, including Sugared Water, The Bennington Review, The Destroyer, Rogue Agent, FreezeRay, Menacing Hedge, and Sad Girl Review.

A poem about my body

kourtney jones

When I water the word: fear
I find some lifetimes gone unlived.
In the tightness of my shoulder blades
lives a thirteen year girl
holding the shape of a swan dive.
The curve of her neck: delicate
and all the toothy boys
bob their own bones back and forth,
and back and forth, at the bay.
In the case of cliff diving
or the physics of tossing the body off of any ledge,
one should fall 32 feet per second closer to its end.
I learn that my body has been born too many times,
with each entrance has forgotten to shed this shape.
In resurrection I become more and more like waterfowl,
aligning the burden of my anatomy with (featherweight) air.
If you are going to feed me anything in this life,
I ask that you do not let your fingers near my throat.
To live and die as saintly as a swan
a girl must grow feathers for floating,
tailor a tongue pure enough to sort and spit out salt.

my grandmother asks me to photograph the harvest moon on friday the 13th, 2019

kourtney jones

Most gasp under Harvest Moon, gather the abundance of summer’s growth. My grandmother counts
the days: . this exact moon, the next. Her body won’t be here. I light my life like a match. She knows
this and releases, a wet eye for each surrender, a knotted throat for every missed season. On her fingers are dead women. In the lines of her palms some map back to some side of the world with a weep. The past Harvest Moon hung above the tight uterus of sky, a handful of lifetimes in her birth and the next. The weather man claims a moon to resurrect in the year 2171. I choke on all the years our mother planet can not sustain. A fire feeds the forest my grandmother is lost in. A ladder finds its way back to the year we were most alive in. Our bodies won’t be here next time the night holds her hands out in offering. Tonight, my grandmother asks me to photograph the moon. We bathe in a bright blink of moment. Some days this living feels like floating in delicate space. My grandmother is on the couch counting cycles. A phone cracks at sundown, and another century has dragged on. It has been said that no woman has ever set fire to the ground. There are no ashes or female feet printed in the armless glowing god above. My grandmother offers fruits and cakes anyway. On her table, a display of plump plum and angel hair. I sleep with my head pointed toward the rising East. My eyes widen open and a spot is left on my sheets. The women on the other side of the world see a fertile rabbit in the moon. I study my own bulging belly. I sleep for as long as I can. My guru says that ghosts enter the crown of the head when pointed West. Men dream of men dreaming of their own face on the moon. Tonight, my grandmother bows in ready worship, a deep hunger, a howl, a prayer in the sky. Allow her to live like a long night. Let her die again and again like moon.

Kourtney Jones is a poet and artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is a current MFA poetry candidate at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.  She can be found typing in public spaces from a typewriter with her performance poetry project known as The Poem Market. Kourtney is the author of the poetry chapbook The Mug Drops. Her current work explores the intersections of languages & dreams, the transmission between the dead & the living, and poetry as a practice for collective liberation.

How the woods move on

amy kinder moore

I see Aaron in Yosemite. He’s wearing a different face.
We pass each other in the woods, and I watch him step

from one life into another. Moving between years,
behind a sequioa. Carrying a pile of yellow light

wrapped in burlap. A girl I don’t know following him.
This is where I make camp. I undress, tie my hammock,

rest a cold plate of beans on my knees. I watch decades
change the earth. Pines droop under the dilating sun.

Ponds dry, fill with thousands of crackling cicada husks.
I open a starving owl’s beak and hear Aaron’s voice,

singing, and the sound of falling water.
Stags lift their faces into the wind,

move out past the tree line.
All of them thin. Searching for shade.

first appeared in Crab Creek Review.

used to love me

amy kinder moore

I’m afraid of the man who used to love me.
I can sense his eyes from miles away:

two brown bullets in the night, whistling. I go deeper
into the red hills, watch each new evening

drench them in gray. Cold settling onto the bruised earth.
Blue dust stains my feet; water seeps into my footprints.

It turns to ice as he gets closer — his rage chilling the earth.
I paint myself like the hills to hide. Wade waist-deep

into the soil, close my eyes. He once held me like this. Gently,
in the dark. Like a knife he could plunge into the frozen ground.

Amy Kinder Moore is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English and Creative Writing. She currently serves as the Assistant Fiction Editor at Bodega Magazine, and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

belly fat and the unbodied child

Benny Sisson

I am your daughter, and I don’t crave mirrors
I haven’t looked in months, that week the power
went out, there were craters, rock sediments, and dust
webs like floss falling off in tons like wet tongues
so I don’t look anymore, I never really did
the body feels like a grass stain or agitated
aluminum, I crash-test-dummy into my bed
room walls so I can feel that smoke-spit on skin
I’ve tried listening to the doctors:
read poetry, scribbled out a pair of legs, ate salted pork and lime
water but I keep ignoring the questions, keep cutting
the body off, as it is, keep smoking and rushing toward
the kind of forever Mom talked about when Dad finally
signed the papers, “This kind of forever can be felt in the lungs”
she would suck air from one bedroom pillows and we would sweat
into a box fan, a swamp cooler, a blanket tied up to look like a wig
all of this is an introduction to the newest girl-child,
the newest daughter whose body you cannot see, cannot squeeze
like belly fat and the sound against her uncertain thighs.

Benny Sisson is a trans writer and publishing professional. She is the author of two chapbooks, American Lake (Ghost City Press 2022) and a red astronaut is an ice cream sundae (rinky dink press 2019). Her work has been published with Foglifter, SPORAZINE, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Formerly a marketing coordinator at HarperCollins Publishers, she is now the Marketing Manager for University of Washington Press. She lives in Tacoma, WA. 

you sit on your knees and pray

Tiffany L. thomas

The mottled hares have emerged for their summer revival: their moon-
eyed roadside worship. You see them this time of year, standing vigil at
the shoulder lines. In the evening, they tremble like felted witch lights or
fur-slick flares. You see them and recognize in you, too, the familiar death
instinct: nails curling in the white-painted pavement, your ruination
accelerating, flickering across your lantern eyes, directly in front of you
and swallowing up your sight.

caribou carcass

Tiffany L. thomas

I am a child when I meet him in the riverside necropolis: the elk man,
rising above the salmon husks—the last bits of red flesh flowering from
his spine like moss, maggots blooming in the bone webs of his horns. It is
a hot day and there is a sound like the beat of a skin drum—like the pulse
of blood in your wrist, pulling as the water does, asking me to lie beside
him in the river rock, to be humbled and picked clean but for the last
vestiges of decay, but for the rot grown into the very rooted parts of the
body—until my father calls me away. It echoes still: an instinctual urge
trickling slick down my back, a wanting — to be left dazed and simmering
beneath the sky.

first appeared in Lindenwood Review.

Tiffany L. Thomas is a dual MA/MFA graduate student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She is a freelance editor of science manuscripts, a volunteer ELL tutor, and, presumably, a poet. She is a recipient of the Richard S. Lynch Writing Award and the Catholic Poetry Society Award.

apiculture

loren walker​

I wear no netting in the apiary, and hold lilacs to be swarmed,
my violet torch aloft, and buzzing.
And from the brush of buckwest, anise and sage:
wax for candles, honey for food, ambrosia, fermented.
The bee labors for others, and so do we in the monastery,
microcosms that cannot survive alone.
Saint Benedict, with this medal nailed to the hive,
bless this slumgum, this broadcomb:
these bits of larvae, cocoons and pollen
gathered by our brown frocks and bare fringe.
How we marvel at hexagons; white/brown/gold;
cold, yet soft, so yielding as we plunge the hot knife
and scrape to release. Honey and water, stirring in threes.
Whispering prayers, until it bubbles.
The mead pours like oil in the bowl.
We sell out within the day: twenty bottles carried off,
my hands sticky, coins in my pocket.
A single drop on my tongue: four corners, rolling, coating, blessing.
And I wonder: when consumed, what settles into my blood,
what visions might cling, and stick?
And every night, I dream of a thousand bodies, thrumming
on my face, to search, and burrow, and never stop.

rum barrels, or a corpse’s natural absorption

loren walker​

Two barrels will retain the body. Preserves the face,
so the mother might recognize, across the ocean.
What every ship carried in copious amounts, now carries a girl;
long dead, but miles from rest; carries a captain
who prided on a daily pint for every British sailor,
half noon, half twilight.
Both bodies folded and submerged, enclosed in oak,
soaked through with sugarcane.
The ship shakes, the fluid moves;
two jarred specimens. And what floats to the surface?
Tissue to wrinkle. Hair in waves. Mouth open, longing
for salt, for savory, anything other than sweet.
A hole drilled in one to steal a sip of their captain;
thirsty men, who missed their shares, and took turns,
one hidden gulp, then another, and another, until, on land again,
their throats burned, parched with memory, never finding its taste equivalent.
But the girl made it back to Beaufort intact,
to play between the graves in the old burying grounds,
unnamed, but forever sweet to the smell.

Loren Walker is a Canadian-American, linocut artist, science fiction/fantasy author, morbid-curious poet. Pushcart Prize nominee; appearances in QU Journal, Coffin Bell, the West Texas Literary Review, River River and others; some fiction awards on the desk. Currently using poetry to study the role of alcohol in history, culture and the everyday.

regarding the electrical conduction system of the human heart

Madeline grigg

It is electricity that tells our hearts
how and when to beat:
a bundle of nodes signals the muscle
to contract at a rate of 80 beats
per minute and my father
says my great-grandfather died
of a daybreak,
that one morning the sun
was a busted peach floating
through a bucket of champagne,
too beautiful for my great-grandfather’s
orchid of a heart.
That afterward my grandmother blinded
herself, reaching deep
under her ribcage to cup the struggling
redfish in her chest, to hold it still,
and every year the doctor divines
a future in my triglycerides and every year
I am more certain of how and why
we die.

first appeared in Barely South Review.

Originally from Texas and currently from Maine, Madeline Grigg is a publishing professional and freelance proofreader whose poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Nimrod, Barely South Review, and elsewhere. In her free time, she bakes, practices aikido, and plays TTRPGs with friends.

past life regression part one

calida osti

I often dream of saving
children. I see
them, curled into corners,
tucking in elbows. I try
to unfold them,
cobweb children
clinched fist. I try
to pull away
free fingers
sugar fist
first to dissolve. I see
them, with small
hands, in my head.
I try to hide
them in the cupboard
or under
the floorboard.
Am I
the hardwood
stowaway?

past life regression part two

calida Osti

I was a cotton candy
child in my dreams
last night life
I lay in a peppermint
swirl dress, peter pan
sleeves grab
my do-si-do wrists,
small alone, small
next to against my
shadow partner, I am
the human shaped hole
transfixed in the wall

Calida Osti is a poet from Georgia currently writing in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has appeared in Better Than Starbucks, Misfit Magazine, One Sentence Poems, Plainsongs Poetry Magazine, WINK, Willawaw Journal, Writers Resist, and more. Say hello on Instagram @rawr_lida. 

acts of contrition

AD Tenn

My mother owes me language
& I owe her love. In baptism
I became her blade,
I became her heel. A wet,
sunken knife
on black concrete — Hail Mary,
Full of Grace. Taste the palm ash
as you kneel.

Monsignor Peter used to buy Communion wine on the corner of Encino
next to the medicinal pot shop. A Holy sky thatched

with telephone wires. El Pollo Loco drive-thrus litter our Holy land.
Pews of devotion, pews that devour.

Eat a year
then another. Confession: I held a girl who squeezed my throat
& when I came
her fingers reminded me of the rosary. This happens all the time.

At the end of the night both our necks
were bruised in violet liturgy.
Apple doves drawn
on the spine forming scripture,

Church. Kiss thy Neighbor, Mark thy Body
with the fall of rain. Confess

with thy sweat. Yes, I must answer.

Yes in my mother’s reaping,
yes in this name: Your Daughter (in fact

& in slander).

My mother owed me a body. This has been forgiven.

And With Your Spirit I am her funeral hymn. My mother owes me nothing

& I am desperate for it.

AD Tenn is 90% poetry and 10% Marxist analysis. They are based in Brooklyn where they work at a non-profit serving the LGBTQ community, of which they are a member. AD believes Mitski is the modern-day Sylvia Plath. They are an MFA student at NYU.

all my friends in grand rapids wrote about moths and i thought it was cliche until i smashed a moth in my bathroom and the moth turned to dust

Dani johnson

I thought,
there is a poem
in that gray smudge
underneath my
bathroom mirror.

Somewhere in that
small stripe is everything
I wanted to say
but couldn’t —

Those molecules,
once a body,
now broken under
my hand. Those
soft antennae
microscopic unfeeling.

Moths don’t have
teeth. They can’t fight
me. I sit on the side
of the tub. I think of
my friends back home.

They are so fragile and
I am so what? heartbroken ?

I said goodbye to one city
and then the whole poem
became sentimental.

doshi house, houston, 2014

Dani johnson

8. what is the shape of your body?

Today I forgot the name of that coffeehouse
in Houston where I wrote most of my letters
to you. Alone, with sweat soaking through my
t-shirt, I wrote a poem about some Christian
body, who masturbated while others slept in
the same room. Along the way, I’d forgotten
how to speak your language, how to punctuate,
how to be in a public bathroom without panic
curled around my neck. You asked why I do
this, and at first it was to pursue truth, but really
it’s to prove my own bravery—so many women
out there are having miscarriages, are getting tattoos,
are blacking out in bedrooms cleaning up
their vomit with muddy jeans, so in my own way,
this celibacy, this poverty, this privacy is just
a way of proving to myself that there is something
worth embracing under this skin.

Dani Johnson is a poet and all around good girl based in Phoenix, Arizona. Dani teaches poetry workshops with Thems, a queer collaborative in Phoenix, and makes coffee with Strawberry Coffee. She holds a BA in Writing from Grand Valley State University and an MFA in Poetry from Georgia College and State University. You can find what she's up to at danijohnsonphx.com. 

at the graveside service

lisa bren

my heels sank
down into the soil // grey suede
like the moon // pushing tiny craters
into soft ground, your new home
our dishes still dirty in the sink // hard with grits
and egg yolk // a breakfast you never ate
and the laundry pile continues growing
an ever-materializing lake // fabric
formless without your skin // if I could
just keep sinking // heels // ankles // shins
down into soil // if we could both leave
our organs // rotting in the ground // you could be
the sun // I could be the moon
we could suspend time // pause
the ocean’s tide

the river’s current

lisa bren

swallowed him // soul and all //
drifting // a memory I sometimes
question // could that be his profile
swimming towards me // dim light //
murky river bed // his likeness
no longer breaking the surface
of my consciousness // we were both
so young // and the empty space
in our timeline // keeps swelling
like an oil spill // covering us all
in a thick iridescence

Lisa Bren is a multidisciplinary artist from the Pacific Northwest, dabbling in visual arts, fiber arts, and, of course, words. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Inflectionist Review, The Meadow, and Rose Red Review and her art has been on display in galleries in the Columbia River Gorge and on Instagram @lisa.bren.

little earthquakes

elizabeth sunflower

I believe it when the mirror
rattles on the wall like a migraine
but the wind doesn’t blow—
so it can’t be that.

The bell on the door clangs
late at night
and the dog barks once
then whimpers.
The bed shakes when he climbs in.

It’s nothing big, just
the weight of him. Shield
my head from flung arms,
a careless elbow tossed at my temple.
Adjust myself to the triangle
made by his armpit.

They say stand in the doorjamb—
you’ll be just fine.

a second earthquake comes to philadelphia and i don’t even notice

elizabeth sunflower

Perhaps I just don’t feel it anymore.
A porcelain cup, flowered and cracking,
I am vessel, thirsty with water,
I am object, used and precious—

see me here on the stained napkin,
threatening the dining room table’s
hard lacquer finish.
The foundation of the house

is a drum, thrumming
so what is one more shock
to the surface, but one more
ripple to course from center to edge.

And so what if water should lap
the gold gilt lip to spread dark
across the embroidered linen?
So what if the cup falls?

Many hands will flutter to save that glossy finish.
Who cares for that chipped little cup anyway?
The saucer broken for years and
the pattern is not quite right.

Elizabeth Sunflower is a poet, teacher, wife, mother, and rock collector living in Philadelphia.

telluride

caroline goodwin

Come, book of myths.
Come tailor, come seamstress,
come theater of dust.
Come butcher and baker

(the golden-bristled
boar) —

When I was young I believed there was a door behind the moon. Ursus Major, pilot
light. When I hustled home from the neighbor’s house, it was nearly springtime. I
couldn’t have known. He had already held my aunt down on the bed. With the
weight of his person. In the corner lot a field of wild borage. Ne m’oubliez mye.
Candlestick,

this grief
a particle of moon

boring into the lung
into the eye

Caroline Goodwin is a poet based in the San Francisco Bay area. Her recent collections are Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press), Madrigals (Big Yes Press) and Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK). She lives with her pugs Jimi Hendrix and Lyric, and teaches at California College of the Arts.