Two nightmares, one dismissive shrug, and a single mark in the snow: Dave Bonta's "Sugar Baby" is eleven lines long, yet it holds a whole attitude toward fear. The speaker reports two dreams, each stranger than the last, then tries to wave them away as theatre. The poem's real interest lies in how little that dismissal manages to settle.
The first dream is built from decay. A woman "was clothed in a shift of worms and whispers", and the line pairs the crawling with the barely heard. The word "shift" means a dress, but it also hints at change, as if the figure were mid-transformation. The speaker does not step closer. He "circled once & crept away, four-footed", which sounds like an animal that has found something dead and thinks better of it. The next line takes this further: "no hands for anything but the road." Hands are what we use to reach, touch and accept, and the dream removes them. All that is left is flight. The hard c and k sounds of "circled," "crept" and later "candied skulls" add a dry, scuttling quality to the language.
The poem then steps back through time: "That was one dream. And the night before..." The reversed order feels true to how we recall dreams, last night first, and it makes the poem seem like casual reporting rather than shaped art. The second dream is the sharper one. "A minor lord of the underworld" speaks with the weary politeness of a bureaucrat: "Of course we take them down with us." The word "minor" shrinks the grandeur of hell, and "of course" makes something monstrous sound like routine procedure. His rhetorical question, "How else do you suppose they taste / eternal youth?", gives the poem its disturbing logic. The pronouns are slippery, and I read "they" as the young who are taken below, though it could also be the underworld's residents who feed on them. Either way, youth is something consumed. The line break after "taste" lets the verb hang for a moment, and the appetite it suggests is physical and faintly obscene.
The title now begins to work. "Sugar baby" is a modern phrase for a young partner supported by an older, wealthier patron, and the poem's logic of youth being bought, used and preserved seems to fit that. I take this as an inference from the title rather than something the poem states outright. What the poem does state is the image of "candied skulls from the Day of the Dead," which fuses sweetness and mortality. The lord himself is "grinning" like one, so the smile is both friendly and a skull's fixed grin. The casual "one of those" sounds like someone pointing at a market stall, which adds a chilling note of normality.
Then comes the speaker's recovery: "Such melodramatic dreams, I said." The joke is on himself, a way of reducing dread to bad acting. But the last line undercuts that composure. He "wrote one yellow word upon the snow." Judging by the imagery, the most natural reading is that he urinated in the snow, though the poem never says so. That would be a crude, animal gesture, a throwback to the four-footed creature who crept away, and a joke at the underworld's expense. It is also an act of writing, and the phrase "one yellow word" quietly makes the speaker a poet leaving his mark. The mark is ephemeral, and the next snowfall or thaw will erase it. The ampersand that opens the final line, echoing the one in "once & crept", makes the ending feel tacked on, as if he can't stop himself adding a last defiant remark.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are loose and conversational, which lets the horror arrive in a calm voice. Its significance lies in that mixture of tones: grotesque, funny, sweet and bleak at once. It suggests that scorn for our own fears is itself a kind of nervous reflex, and that the body, crude and living, may be the best answer we have to the underworld's sugar-coated promises.