Diabetic Gumdrops

poems by

Ephraim Scott Sommers

~88 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: September/October 2026

An Advance Sale Discount price of $9 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/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.

Ephraim Scott Sommers is a singer-songwriter, poet, essayist, and the author/composer of two books (The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire and Someone You Love Is Still Alive), as well as two albums (Pine Mountain Dirt and Stones & Smoke). Ephraim tours regionally throughout the southeastern region and calls Rock Hill, South Carolina his home. For more words and music, please visit: https://ephraimscottsommers.com.

I’m completely jealous of the odes that make Diabetic Gumdrops such a passionate and profound book of poems on love, loss, and physical well-being. This is no surprise as I’ve always loved Ephraim Scott Sommers’s work and his ability to write that which has as much conviction as it is convicting, “Again, you have thrown too much of yourself/toward the algorithm of wanting to be adored.” These are pages through which a soul speaks life. ~Jericho Brown

Ephraim Sommers is a real poet who transforms tragedy into song. This is an amazing gift of speaking in tongues: when the poet says sugar and means it “morphs into shards in my veins,” when a hand holds “a whole rotisserie chicken like a winter mitten,” when he sees himself as “the sunken piano of me smashing through your ceiling.” Charged with the voltage of Whitman-like incantation, this is a memorable book. ~Ilya Kaminsky

To the Oldest Music Lesson There Ever Was

You cocky fuck. Again, you have forgotten.
Again, you have thrown too much of yourself
toward the algorithm of wanting to be adored,
so you must go back with only your ear, now,
to the first moment of your being moved toward
motion, that first rhythm that shoved your shoulders
forward against the walls of your own skin, the sound
of your hometown, your father’s drums like buffalo
running through the basement below your bedroom.
You must go back to kindergarten choir, one tenor
vomiting, inadvertently, into the curly hair of the other,
the first trainwreck you made in front of an audience.
You are mistaken, again, today, so you must concede
so. You must recognize the horror of on-stage silence
not as defeat but as necessary blood given for beginning.
Again, you must destroy the notion you are owed anything.
You must bury yourself again in many remembered
silences. You must go back to being a wooden child
in the back seat of a station wagon, a big Christmas
pine tied onto the top with red twine, and your mother
humming a red hymn all the way down El Camino
on the way home, at night, all the electric outlines
of lights holding together the outline of each house,
like neon churches, like glowing lungs caroling away
the winter darkness over California. Some days,
you must blend the color of your voice with others,
and some days you must only sit still. You must
go back to that past album of you in Mitchell Park alone
with Joni Mitchell on a Monday, yellow splatters of summer,
you on your back in the slow grass with a tall can of beer,
a ladybug taking the long way up your forearm, you
with your headphones on, falling in love with what
blue sounds like, the sound clouds make when they die.
Go back again. You must. You, who are engaged
in this lifetime rehearsal of bending yourself
into a better instrument, must go back to all those
days you and your guitar sifted through the empty
spaces in your house for the exact shape in the air
to make of loneliness, that hollow auditorium
a body can be for feelings to float right on through.
Some days have a soul running in a dead sprint, without
a body, just like that, right on past you. Some days
play you with magic fingers outside an open car window
and leave nothing behind as proof. Some days
make a music that is so perfect the world seems
to have forgotten all about you, and the lesson, of course,
is this: some days, there are no more notes to add,
and you just shut up and listen.

Ode to Spouses of Diabetics

and how they find us
in the darkened kitchen
at 3:16AM
in our underwear shirtless
spotlit by the light
of the open fridge
our right hand wearing
a whole rotisserie chicken
like a winter mitten
like an edible oven glove
a scattering of exposed bones
across the linoleum all around us
like the leftovers of already been hatched insects
a few cracked walnut shells
like oversized birdseed
and two opened rectangles
of naked white cheese
are waiting to be bitten into
on the white windowsill
while a squirt of mustard
on the microwave’s see-through face
dribbles down in slow-motion
and we Diabetics are half drunk
not on booze
but on two dizzy
and opposite truths
the brief half-open window
where treating low blood sugar means
eating whatever savior we want
in the name of survival
and what a joy to abandon the nuisance
of nutritional charts
to wherever they tumble
out of existence
because we have returned to the heaven
of unencumbered eating
and always our lovers watching
by the backstage door
like rock band managers
one eye on their lover on stage
one eye on their lover’s glucose monitor
themselves in their own polite dance
between when to let us paddle further
into the pantry
and when to throw us the grappling hook
to pull us out of the deep deep dark
so we must repeat the refrain
so holy so so holy
are our lovers
who keep chaperoning us through
this delicate dodging of our own deaths
because what brief windows
between deadly tidal waves
all of us together as couples must rediscover
the muscles to open up wider and to laugh inside
and to laugh outside too
for what has been dangerous
on this tiny night
in this little minute
will now be survived
so back to this brief delight
of us Diabetics at 3:17AM
beside the cool cherry pool
of a gallon of Greek yogurt
or a whole cherry pie
or a half a tray of cold lasagna
on the counter
and all the waters
tasty and calm and wide open
and all of us about to shallow-wade
no handed
and with our whole faces
as if snorkeling
and without thinking finally (thank you)
right into every single one

To Apocalypse Mondays

On a Monday like this, the tiny
irritations seem to stump
and groan and claw on top
of each other like zombies
and then stumble their messy way
as a sudden and united platoon
of terror beyond and over my best
meditative defenses, and then, of course,
they fall, rare meat and all, right onto
the breakfast table of my generally
peaceful yogurt with walnuts.
On a Monday like this, I have
a hard time not seeing my life as this
one genre on repeat because the narrative
of my blood sugar is never ending,
and how did I end up in the role
of the musician who must be murdered first?
And please, I know, don’t write this off
as a daily whine. I believe I have
earned the right to ask a question
like that. I can be hyperbolic
for a moment because this is my first
and only scene, because I’m on my knees
on the bathroom floor, again,
sopping up last night’s piss, the after-
math of some midnight dizzy
spell I had while standing
before the toilet in the dark
with low blood platelets. My wife is
curled around a body pillow
in the bedroom, home sick with food
poisoning, puking noodles and rice
like soup back into a plastic bowl
I must empty again and again
on a Monday like this when I have
to prove my health excuse by phone
argument in order to get out of jury
duty, and when there are always medical
bills waiting like rusty animal traps
on the back dresser, and when the anger
of a Monday like this takes
an apple-sized bite out of my windpipe,
I need to bitch by written word
to anyone who will listen
on Reddit and respond. Will anyone
out there be my action hero? I need
to make confessions to online
priests of all different denominations
in internet anonymity, need to say,
in secret, what I’d never say
out loud, that, on a Monday
like this, I worry less and less
about the world’s current tragedy
because I’m currently on my knees,
trying not to coma or shoulder
the toilet out of the bolted floor
in my own. I confess, in anger,
I am even more selfish with my sympathy
than I used to be. I confess,
I am, always, looking, too much,
at myself in my iPhone because it is
attached by invisible Bluetooth
to the sticky, square patch
(on the back of my arm), which surrounds
the small, oval-shaped sensor,
which houses the half-inch needle
which is, right now, buried
in my soul and giving me
an important but boring reading
of my current blood sugar
every five minutes, a helpful, 24-hour
graph, and so much math, and an average
number for any length of life
I choose. I, the bionic body, always
half-bleeding, am only ever half-alive
because think of it, the cruel division
of all of it, on a Monday like this,
of my frustration and my failure,
and any laughter I’d ever hope
to have, all shrunken down
into this tiny lens, all those changeable
frames, when looked at through this
Diabetic eyeball, are nothing more
than digital valleys and mountains
of my civil war with sugar.
And so much public up and down
out there to think about: Fiji Earthquake,
Hollywood Hills in flames, bombs
in Ukraine and Palestine and schools,
a flood in the Appalachians, a plane
going dark in the Black Sea,
I know, I am not immune,
but all the agony in the world,
for me, translates into a little white dot
on a graph leaping up and down over
the obstacles of my Diabetes.
Ok. I am on my knees finally
to share what is most private in me.
I am almost undead. I am ugly
and failing, so often, to find
a breath about anything
other than running away
from my body and my blood
on a Monday like this.