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.