Candy Head
poems by
Kayla Sargeson
~72 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: June/July 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Kayla Sargeson is the author of the microchapbook Twilight Zone Summer (Death Drive Press, 2024) as well as the full-length collection First Red (Main Street Rag, 2016) and the chapbooks Head on a Shelf, BLAZE, and Mini Love Gun, all from Main Street Rag. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in 5 AM, Cimarron Review, South Dakota Review and elsewhere. Sargeson lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches at Point Park University and the Community College of Allegheny County. From January-August 2022, she served as interim director of the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. https://sargesonkm.wixsite.com/kayla-sargeson
This collection takes the reader on a wild journey. With a twisted kind of lost love as its backdrop, Candyhead explores the importance of place and the complexities of relationships. Rooted in places such as Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and the speaker’s body, these poems are so heartsick, but also at times equally laugh-out-loud funny. It’s the way Sargeson balances grief and the mundane, sadness and humor—humor around themes that aren’t inherently comical—that makes this collection unique and enjoyable. ~Niki Herd, The Stuff of Hollywood
This is a book of tributes to friendship as well as a shedding of what no longer serves the heart. The act of witnessing is the blessing and the needle that pierces the tongue of heartbreak of forgiveness and death and Sunday evening. Candyhead finds gratitude on the other side of anguish, where sunlight beams through a broken screen door and makes rainbows out of “something that once bled.” Sargeson arrives at self-love and desire as she oscillates from north to south to dirt to mother to letting go and landing in acceptance. These poems puncture the skin, circle desire, slip in and out of love, and they satiate skin hunger with truths too vast to fit in Sargeson’s make-up bag. ~Nicole Santalucia, author of Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians (Bordighera Press, 2026).
Candyhead
Pete has me lean so far back it looks like we’re Spiderman kissing,
my candy colored head way off the chair.
I won’t let you fall.
What you got going on here? Pete laughs, squeezes the small pink bun on top of my head.
I’m fancy now I tell him as Ali drives by, yelling
Don’t get that tattoo on your throat!
Little cactus on my little throat, named Dean
after the fake cactus Nate’s mom sent me for Xmas last year.
I thought the cactus was real, took it to work
to live with the other plants. Asked Deena how to care for a cactus.
Sarah pointed it out—I see you brought a fake cactus in.
I give Pete my throat,
our pink and dark hairs swirling together.
Two White Men on a Bus
When my father died,
I wanted the world to stop.
I swear I saw one of the men kiss another man,
but this morning he keeps saying my wife, my wife.
They both take up two seats.
The big one’s elbow digs into my side.
There’s no room for me in their world
and why should there be?
My sister lives in California.
Look, 100K just doesn’t stretch there
the way it does here.
You hear about the shooting in Wilkinsburg,
the black kids and the barbecue?
The big one is sweating.
The not gay one clutches a briefcase.
They could be any men:
the friend who got angry after I wouldn’t send him nudes,
the colleague who asked if I got fucked on my birthday.
I want an elbow out of my side/
to be able to breathe comfortably.
I don’t care what they think about pay equality
when the not gay one won’t look me in the eye
at the bus stop.
Carnivorous
Mother rabbits eat their first litter.
Ali tells me this over miniature cupcakes
and M&Ms.
I had this rabbit once.
She walked on her babies,
crushed them until they bled.
The next day she went to the cage
and the little ones were gone.
I couldn’t look at her after that.
I tell her all mothers eat their eldest children
and get it right with the next born.
Can you imagine that?
Eating six babies in one night?
She must’ve been so full.
I’m picking at acidic pasta salad.
I’m not satisfied. I want something more,
something that once bled.
Maybe my mother and I would have gotten along if she had eaten me,
felt me squirming inside her again.
Maybe there’d finally be that familial bond between us
other than that Estée Lauder Spanish Red
and I wouldn’t be left hungry,
greeting the world with a greedy mouth.
Twilight Zone Summer
Close to 4 am and Lauren and I sit on my stoop,
watch three guys try to leave the playground across the street.
They’re too drunk to find the opening,
so they climb over the fence.
One of the three can’t make it,
straddles, lands on his dick.
One friend has to pull from one side/
the other pushes.
It takes an hour.
This is the Rod Sterling version of my life
where grown men can’t make their way out of a park,
where suddenly I like wine,
and sitting, laughing with Lauren,
just the right amount of drunk—
the first time I’ve ever felt full.
