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Sunday, November 23, 2014

The Sound of Sugar....Erica Dawson


Everybody Down

Around this time of year, someone will fall
Over Great Falls. It could be me if I
Left Tampa’s flatness for Virginia’s drawl.
Altiloquent, high-flying cardinals’ cry

Whit chew. The Civil War has its own app,
e-iPhone forts; but, love rides war roughshod
Over Virginia for lovers and sap
Sugar maples. I could get right with God

Here, and descend from blue preoccupations
Catching humidity latching on white
Oak trees, and tangle with indoctrinations:
Survival of the fittest; fright or flight;

Heat rising. Metamorphic slab for miles
Above the water table, stipule spines
Float somewhere for a stagnant spot. Rock stiles
Tease ticks to Climb back up. The ripples’ brine

Is really schist’s sharp grains. How do you like
Me now, God? Accident of fractured bone,
One with nature, the solstice, and a hike.
I bloom in spring. In spring, I die as stone.




About the Poet:

Erica Dawson’s first collection of poems,
Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser 2007), won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her new collection, The Small Blades Hurt, is forthcoming from Measure Press. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, Harvard Review, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the undergraduate, and the low-residency MFA, program at University of Tampa.

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.  


Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Sound of Sugar....Charlie Malone

Illusive, Weeded

white chicken feathers scatter across the lawn
red specks glisten wet grass thick with
dandelions.
                  the door to the coop is ajar.

beyond this    flight    thick rows of pine

dead limbs scratch and snap

                                               heart slows
deeper in the woods     skittish deer bed down
within the rectangle of a toppled sugarhouse
bucket rust.

                        pick up a brick and the wet
rotting leaf smell it holds down rises

the cold mass fills small hands.

an earthworm writhes in the vacancy
reddish centipedes scatter

a potato bug rolls in the palm.






About the Poet:
Charlie Malone recently returned to the Midwest to occupy a house in the woods outside a small town home to a not-exactly-small university, Ferris State. Malone studied literature and writing at Kent State and Colorado State and liked it just fine. He is grateful to all his students, teachers, colleagues, his wife, and the the kind editors who see something worthwhile in his work. Charlie's writings can be found in or are forthcoming with The Dunes Review, Phoebe, The Laurel Review, as well as the anthology A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park. 


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.