Alexandra Watson is the executive editor of Apogee Journal, a publication providing a platform for underrepresented artists and writers. She is a Lecturer in the First-Year Writing program at Barnard College, where she has received a Provost's Innovative Teaching Grant. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, The Common, The Bennington Review, The Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Nat. Brut., Breadcrumbs, Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, Apogee, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing, and has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for community arts programming. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Find her work at alexandrawatson.net.
NOTES ON READING FROM THE POET:
Between the time The Swamp accepted "Sugar Daddies" and now, I have made some edits, including cutting the first stanza. While I like the image of the rum (a byproduct of sugar) in the now-missing stanza, I believe the mood of that stanza no longer fits with my current feelings about the poem. The poem is about the sugar industry, especially in the Caribbean, and traces the product's dark history of exploitation, colonialism, and slavery.
POET’S SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING:
Sugar Daddies
in Barbados where my love is from
they traded in cane for the coasts
sipping Mount Gay
which boasts its coral-filtered water
open-air and heirloom strain
a wash populated with yeast
converting sugar to this leggy caramel
over twinkling slivers of ice
and the Coca-Cola is made there
so the sweet is from cane and not corn
which causes our American diabetes
i was today years old when i learned
cane has the sucrose of any plant, just more
so only cane’s pulpy bamboo bark
do we bite the stalk and suck
only cane sweetens whole empires
balances the Queen’s bitter tea
and split open hands by the millions
in Hispaniola, Jamaica, Guyana, Guadeloupe
a stinking sickening sludge that sticks
and drips from the Triangle in my mind
in Louisiana, too, where they sent our kin
they couldn’t break in Carolina
sometimes i forget: plants have DNA too
which means some living stalk’s great
great great great great great great great great
grand-stalk was hand planted and later
approached by machete and perhaps
in a last gesture of resistance
flared its sharp skin and cut back
sliced a woman who had declared that day her enemy
that stalk that made her stomach sick
and ruined her daughter’s beautiful hands
asking how much more misery
could bend a fibrous body’s capacity
and going on chopping
the sun converting sugar to sweat
sweeter than all the other fruit.