The Sound of Sugar....Rio Cortez

                          SALT LAKE

This is the place!                    Space is the place.

-Brigham Young                      -Sun Ra



I slip the silksac of my body    & walk out     onto the flats
the air a machine      sucking earth into fragments of white    absorbing heat 
      finding me    starting to burn


I kneel at the shore      I reach into the lake     it is red   as a cut    
      I reach into the wound of it     I drag out    its string of black   
bones     and now I am two     times the dark  


I crush skeletons    of artemia underfoot   I eat eggs    in stasis the dead    lake idles
the city       surrounds    what weapons we are    I fold the net  of my shadow   I keep it
   as evidence





About the Poet:

Rio Cortez has received fellowships from Cave Canem & Canto Mundo Foundations. She was a recipient of the Sarah Lawrence College Lucy Grealy Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New York University & co-founder of the Good Times Collective. Her work has appeared in Clementine, Tuesday, Tidal Basin, Sugar House Review, Cratelit & Saul Williams' Chorus. Born & raised in Salt Lake City, she now loves & lives in Queens, NY.


About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.