Sugar Baby Sonnet
Paige Passantino
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The website for meeting daddys was free to use
with a student email address. On the sugar side, of course.
The others paid. Both sides were merely seeking, arranging
something with range: six images for pleasure, a curation
dependent on if today’s girl would be show, or telling,
which story might be borrowed for making – my whole life a dress,
assembled from pattern. A father in jail, a nose made for huffing.
Needle in flame. Now, I have a student that always asks
the same questions about the stories we’re reading: Why?
Why did the mother not love her? Why did the child feel alone?
My father once kicked my sister in the stomach like a dog.
When I asked her about it, she said well, it was more like a shove,
right? Most things we won’t ever know. My life was rich and easy.
Fate made me an expert in stories that sell.
AUDIO
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About this poem: At the start of 2025, I found myself exploring the sonnet form and how it has come to be utilized in contemporary dialogue. While I read many collections and crowns of sonnets, it was to my great surprise that it was in reading Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets I became inspired by the sonnet as a stage, or a mode of performance. This provided me with what felt like the perfect space to explore my relationship and experience with sex-work. I found that the assigned disguise, or costume, of the sonnet allowed me access to truths I hadn’t been able to consider prior. The result has been an ongoing series of “Sugar Baby Sonnets” of which this poem is a part of, a series that explores the stories we tell ourselves and others, and has come to be my own personal and poetic type of drag.
Paige Passantino is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. Her work can be found on Poets.org, in Pinhole Poetry, Zenaida, Emulate, and others, and is forthcoming in The Florida Review. She is the recipient of the 2023 Academy of American Poets’ Anne Bradstreet Prize, commended for the 2023 Adroit Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House. She is an editor and reader for The Massachusetts Review.
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