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.  

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Steve Langan

THE MIDWEST

I remember this old guy at the bar

where I worked gestured toward a girl

seated with friends at a round table

and said, You really need to learn to pause,

study the small of a woman’s back,

the parallel lines subtly curving upward—

are her shoulders little shouts or whispers?—

and her neck, slightly untuned, does it plead?—

to know how best to begin to pursue her.

But I was mainly interested in scoring then,

in showing you how many bottles I could

hold aloft in the dim light, and getting

and staying loaded for days at a time.

It’s rude to talk too much about yourself.

That’s what we learn here in the Midwest.

Days are numbered, we ask you to contribute

to the bottom line, to catch one another

in your sullen reproaches, crashing swoons,

make it look easy these next squalid hours.

Some little nitpickers claim we’re improving.

But we can’t all be angels of mercy or pain,

hunting and gathering, failing and building,

saving nothing for later, sleeping it all off.

About the Poet:

Steve Langan was born in Milwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the author of Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009), and What It Looks Like, How It Flies (2013).

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Natalia Treviño

Tortilla Skins

In the hot light of your kitchen, ‘Uelita, you showed me how to

press the thick dough against your popping, aluminum table. Your

hands the size of the tortillas to come, willing the mass to open

as soft disk. My hands too small to maneuver, to stretch over it,

to pull the dry powder in. I was fifteen and knew you were happy.

Years after ‘Buelito had died, you a new kind of woman. Certain eyes.

Laughing, traveling, playing cards. Able to wake and say no, to skip

the heat of the day to cook the midday meal. Bake a cake instead, at

night. Crochet and smoke at the same time. Speak up around men.

Accept a small glass of beer. The dough as cool as your hands, your

red fingernails disappearing into the ball. Would you remarry? I

ask. You are quick to answer. Yes, it is ugly to live alone. Your fingers

have memorized this motion, this touch. All I can think is how the

wives in Mexico flail in sick waters, in tired, wakeful oceans, choppy

white crests salting their faces, silenced and gasping by the slap of

spray. Romantic novella endings kneaded into the eyes and ears of

daughters, spiteful neighborhood chisme, the sealing orders from

men, sons, brothers, husbands. The lines on your face, Uelita, deep

like the folds of the dough in your hands. The portraits in your

living room, bridal framed faces, faint as shells at the end of flat

beach, stripped of color by the brine of dry sunlight, waiting for

the tide to soak them, turn them, or swallow them. Bone exposed at the

back of the neck, you bend to your yes. And we press our tortilla

skins to the heat, their faces down, to cook them.

About the Poet:

Born in Mexico City, Natalia grew up in Texas where her mother taught her Spanish and Bert and Ernie gave her lessons in English. Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction including the 2004 Alfredo Moral de Cisneros Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Currently, Natalia is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College where she works with students of all levels.

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Vidhu Aggarwal

umbilical with titles from Vidhu Aggarwal on Vimeo.

Humpadori Umbilical Cord Friend

Euphoria:

I arrive, singly—

prizing

the belly to unfuzz

the static orchestra,

to expand the warm feelings, play jump rope!

A neon pulse—a dimple—wanders

in

and out on you—

Lickety split. Spit and lick

the seal.

Close your eyes. And all the shine will migrate there:

lubing the tube, where the oxygen bells and surges,

ripening incidence, wings,

and miscellaneous

appendages.

Worlds-a-rama lotus out

of your skin and hinges. Soft

Camelots

peep and spore. A door opens.

You’re adored.

You’re another Venus

Hottentot, Venus with fur. It’s almost a dream:

You can always be more than you are—

Since you’re more than you want to be.

I’m your live feed

of nerves dangling, attached and rhyming, going to seed.

If you pluck the grub-end, I might bleed

horizons,

a free-form history, but never free.

About the Poet:

Vidhu Aggarwal grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and Sugar Land Texas, and currently lives and teaches in central Florida. Her poetry and video are a mash-up of cultural forms such as Bollywood, Star Trek, video games, internet porn, anime, minstrel shows, and tourist attractions. Her poems can be found in Sugar House Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Juked, Nimrod, PANK, desi-lit, and interlope among others. Readings and videos are available at the website
www.vidhu-aggarwal.squarespace.com. She is the found editor of SPECS, a journal of arts and culture with issues on Toys, The Perverse, and Homuncular Flexibility – www.specsjournal.org.

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Kevin McLellan

There's Hard Light and Soft Light

everyday. The same church van

driver insistently honks

for the same elderly lady

dressed for God. My open

3rd floor window faces

the street. The sidewalk

dug up. Now it appears

the same young mouse

I released last week is under

the neck of a red wine bottle

in the recycling bin. Bring it

outside again. Runs clumsily

toward the liquor store.

The bright yellow sign. Yesterday

a man ran out of there

and got hit by a taxi. As the driver

argued with a witness

the man lying conscious across

the yellow lines. Only his left arm

moved. Caressing the bumper

as he looked blankly into the sky.

About the Poet:

Kevin McLellan lives in Cambridge, MA, and sometimes teaches po- etry workshops at URI. He is the author of the chapbook Round Trip, a col- laborative series of poems with numerous women poets. Kevin has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, Sugar House Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others.

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Sandra Marchetti

 

GIRL IN STONE

I’m sheaving off the morning

in swells and scrolls,

Athena’s curls wave

past my back to the sea.

Diadems of light come forward

in sweet births. The day

laurels in their neat way

turn to greet me—

I slip my sandal up

the fluted curves, the steps

that roll over, Ionic,

stomped in place like

divots in a loaf.

My eyes, without irises,

gaze into place.

Round ovums, sleep centers—

they fall back to sockets, soft

as children come

to nest beneath my arms.

About the Poet:

Sandra Marchetti’s debut full-length collection of poems, Confluence, will be published as part of Gold Wake Press’ 2014 Print Series. Sandy is also the author of a chapbook, The Canopy (available from MWC Press), and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Thrush Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, The Journal, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. sandrapoetry.net.

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Rob Carney

HOME APPRAISALS

1. TWO-STORY, STONE AND BRICK, SINGLE-FAMILY DWELLING

If there’s added value in a ceiling fan,

then there must be value in a hawk. They come

for the doves, the ridiculous quail, and quick sparrows

squabbling daily on our neighbor’s lawn,

suddenly plunging from nowhere, suddenly gone—

launched off before my eyes blink open.

And there must be value every time they miss

so plunge becomes pursuit, becomes a game

played out in fan-tailed figure-eights; it’s wild:

your heartsong humming, the sky brighter blue. . .

I know this won’t go into the appraisal—

just bedrooms, baths, etc.; two-car garage.

There isn’t any math that factors this.

No box to check if the front yard comes with a hawk.

2. TOOL SHED, WORKSHOP, FULLY FENCED BACKYARD

Tomatoes can be yellow!

Also small and shaped like ovals! We’re learning things here:

that leaving out a shovel equals rust,

that seeds and dirt can make food out of air,

that carrots follow their own thoughts underground—

they must, or why so many knots and curves

and none of them the same? We’re learning sounds:

how August wind chimes mean a break from heat.

We’re learning smells like rain on dust. It’s too much

to count, to fit inside an estimate.

I’d measure me carrying the baby around

before I went in, verified square feet.

I’d measure me holding up things for him to touch,

saying This is a pine cone, Jameson. This is a leaf.

3. .17 ACRES. CULINARY WATER

Not every decimal point is accurate.

They sometimes miss dimension, overlook

the sweep a peach tree adds to the backyard

just by moving in the wind. . . Imagine it

gone now, downed by a storm. Imagine books

with missing pages . . . you know it’s more than words

that disappear. So don’t discount the tree.

There’s more to calculate than area.

Last summer, for instance, in the kitchen—peaches peeled,

the crust rolled out—who knows what she saw,

exactly, as I stood there making pie?

But she flashed a smile as bright as cinnamon,

and I could tell exactly what she meant. . .

Best one-point-something hours that whole July.

4. 2,140 SQUARE FEET

says nothing at all about the unsquare angles.

The living and dining rooms are heptagons—amazing—

I didn’t even know that was a shape.

You pass between the two through an open arch

but not the kind of arch you see in church,

the kind you find in women: rounded hips,

the small of her back, her somersaulting laugh,

her slow smooth way of coming ’round from sleep.

Upstairs follows the roof line—trapezoids,

odd polygons. Three windows look out

at the mountains—more angles balancing the sky. . .

Once when I was seventeen, the moon

looked close enough to walk to. Right there. Huge. . .

The archway makes me think of that sometimes.

5. JANUARY 26, 2009

Forty-three thousand job cuts in one day,

in just one morning. Thirty thousand more

by late-afternoon. Mine wasn’t one of them.

We’re not part of the millions since last May

who’ve lost their homes—lost porches and front doors,

the mantel ’round their fireplace, the trim

they painted ’round the windows one April:

pale green to go with her flower garden.

Or the place where he first saw her naked.

Or their kids’ favorite hiding closet. All. . .

whatever the details, whatever their plans. . .

How do you fit that in boxes, tape-gun it shut?

I don’t know; the news didn’t answer. Instead they ran

the weather: Cold. Then a story about a duck.

6. 3 BDRM, 2 BA, KITCHEN, FRML DINING

The baby has a bed but likes ours more.

He lets us know it, too. He lets it fly—

like crossing two cats fighting with a war

between accordions—but he is cute, for sure.

And he’d eat everything if he had teeth,

eat all the foods his sister won’t: the fruit,

the eggplant parmesan, whatever’s there;

already he’s reaching like a quick-draw artist.

And here is where he’ll learn to walk, then run,

then go out back in our sun-fat garden. . .

Yes, the house has a crawl space underneath.

Yes, the radiator’s certified. . .

I’m picturing him with his brothers and sister:

all that noisy tangle in the yard.

7. UPGRADES TO THE PROPERTY: N/A

So none of what I’m telling you applies;

it’s all not applicable. I’m not surprised;

it’s just another headline like the rest:

like Economic Crisis Faces Pres.,

like More Firms Pressed to Liquidate,

like Home Sales Sluggish, Price Decay, that’s all.

My cat, for one, could care less. He’s focused

on squirrels: right up the tree trunks, onto limbs.

He’s pretty bad-ass. He’d stretch out on the news,

or credit report and appraisal, and go to sleep. . .

I think that’s worth a note or two, don’t you? . . .

And the grape vines, hawks, the backyard corner

where the swing-chair hides behind camellias? . . .

And how, when it’s still, you can hear the whole house purr?

About the Poet:
Rob Carney is the author of three collections—Story Problems (Somondoco, 2011); Weather Report (Somondoco, 2006); and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts, winner of the 2002 Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Contest—and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs, winner of the 2002 Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Competition, and This Is One Sexy Planet, winner of the Frank Cat Press Poetry Chapbook Award in 2005. Home Appraisals, a new chapbook, including several poems that first appeared in Sugar House Review, is forthcoming from Plan B Press in fall 2012. He is a Professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.






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.

The Sound of Sugar....Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

Now I Am Ready To Tell How Bodies Are Changed Into Other Bodies.


Plane trees are dressed for severity;
snow drapes their sturdy shoulders

like wool wraps. Twists of collarbone
lie exposed, each vein coagulates

in the cold. Even their bare bodies
look alive against stormed skies.

To better survive concrete and smoke,
the native sycamore was crossed

with an Oriental. Lost in the transfer
to urbanization, my name changes

as the plane tree’s. Time requires
my body as a sacrifice. Or is it love.

Most century-old sycamores are
hollow at heart, not by scythe of shit

and smog but as a shield for swallows
and swifts. I watch their bark gleam

like picked bones at midnight, clicking
to the tremors of the blizzard. This

is how I console myself along with
the fact that sycamore wood is almost

impossible to split. Yesterday I saw
an aged plane tree at the butcher’s,

a bloody block, atoms still tightly
wound, endlessly hacked. I thought

of how it didn’t stand long enough
to become a hive for swallows and

squirrels but bleeds now through
other skins. After not eating meat

for years, I bought a rack of lamb.
The butcher tucked it in brown paper,

made a swift knot of twine and
wiped the blood on his apron.







About the Poet:

Natalie Bryant Rizzieri is a poet by morning, an activist by day, and a mother by night, except it isn't quite as neat as that.  She runs a tiny group home called Warm Hearth for orphans with disabilities in Armenia.  She also spends her time, at least in spring, digging for earthworms with her two sons and husband in Queens, New York. 



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. 

The Sound of Sugar....Teri Youmans Grimm

My Mother Tells Me I Was Conceived In Fire Before I Was Condemned By It

I was admiring the trimmings in O.L. Keenes,
the lace, the ostrich feathers in pale colors. Was it
the steam whistle I noticed first, grey clouds
rolling up from the ground? I don’t remember.
The city was imperiled. From the doorway, I saw
flames in the northwest moving at a gallop.
It was terrifying. Bay Street filled with people
heading east, I joined them, passing families laden
with mirrors, dishes, children leading dogs on strings,
carrying bird cages, so many horses and drays loaded
down with trunks, me holding only a pale pink feather,
worrying how I’d pay for it now.

At Monroe Street,
unable to help myself, I turned around to face the blazing
pursuer. Angels of oblivion pummeled toward me
on billowing,black smoke, like an engraving by Dore’—
this nightmare rendered so precisely.
Isn’t it magnificent? I said to a man nearby. His eyes
considered me. They were oddly green, like verdigris
and heavy-lidded.

Sparks landed like confetti, but long I was willing
to stay there and watch this parade of danger so close
he brushed it from my hair and I brushed it from his sleeve,
before he clutched my hand, pulled me with the others
past Hemming Plaza, into the Windsor Hotel crowded
with the displaced, belongings stacked everywhere,
then down a corridor into a room.
Even when the door clicked shut, I thought of him
as protector while wondering who would save me now.

Ostrich feather gripped in my hand, I did all he told me to do.
Why I never let it go. Why I never fought at all, but laid there
long after he left until smoke filled the room clearing my head
and I fled with hundreds of other bodies, empty-handed
out of that hotel, each of us racing in the direction that felt right.

Toward the river I ran. Across it was this house, untouched
and I wondered if William was imagining me dead.
At the dock I turned around one last time,
and this is what I know of Hell:

The Windsor had become a furnace, radiating heat far and wide,
the flame of its burning ascending towards Heaven, groaning
with a thunderous voice in its agony. The steamer pulled
away and a dead moccasin floated by. Another then another
and another and another. What to make of it, I didn’t know.
As though it was a sign that evil had been vanquished.
But it hadn’t been. It burned inside and half the sky was on fire
and what trees remained in the distance looked like skeletons
and everyone on the boat was cast in the strangest yellow light,
like none I’d ever seen, altering features until any one
of the passengers could have been him.

Still riding the billows of smoke like clouds,
the angel of oblivion appeared to me and in my own bed
that night. Awake or dreaming, it was a true vision all the same.
I was with child and this one would live. She smirked at me
and the clock read 11:00 exactly and your father’s face
(your father’s face?) was bathed in that same yellow glow
and it was more than I could bear. I turned from him
and pressed my hand to where it hurt and was horrified grateful.
Looking at you now, I’m horrified grateful.

At church, in a park, on the trolley,
when I see men that resemble my memory of him—
a grey serge suit, drowsy-lidded eyes, a cleft chin,
to this day I want to ask: Were you that stranger?
Were you that stranger? Please, tell me your name.









About the Poet:

Teri Youmans Grimm lives in Jacksonville, FL with her husband and two children. Her first collection, Dirt Eaters, was chosen for the University of Central Florida’s poetry series and was published by the University Press of Florida. Her work has appeared in the Connecticut Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and Homegrown in Florida: An Anthology of Florida Childhoods, among other publications. She teaches in the University of Nebraska’s low-residency MFA program.



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. 

The Sound of Sugar....Ryan J Browne

Theory of Spall

Ft. Carson, Colorado

i.

It’s your job now. Creep
beneath them with a gun.
Blunt the dumb and serrate

work of time and sand.
Douse those Hummers
parked in rows

like ornamental gourds
set out to dry, spray them down
with the pink Product.

There’s vats of the stuff
in the white truck, and it sloshes
like a filling piggy

bank when tanks cross you up
and you have to unkink
the hose to your air gun.

You get Product in your mouth—
and taste gristle—because
you’ve removed the mask

you’re supposed to wear.
A song kept getting caught
in it and steaming up the goggles

you’re supposed to wear
but have also taken off.
You get Product in your eyes.

It biodegrades. You’re safe.
You’re on a military base
where the sun bleaches and dyes

you when you’re up top
blasting each line
of rivets, every hinge,

swinging grille, seam
or possible seam, bolt, nut,
washer, mirror joint, antenna.

Underneath, another anatomy.
Spine, scapulae, ribs, hips, coccyx,
hunks of grease and mud, a whole steel ruck

you let your air gun joyride across.
Shoot from the hip.
And those holes punched through into the cab

you first thought were from bullets or shrapnel,
dreaming up and immediately dismissing the carnage
boxed in above you, they blow like a jug

keeping irregular time
for the hissing refrain of pressurized air.
You’re thorough enough.

But if you miss one bolt on one Hummer
you miss it on them all.
But that one bolt, well, it may not matter.

ii.

This morning you sweat booze,
and the whole damn thing seems worse.
Your skull is a soft warhead

you wish to squash
against a tank’s armor,
but the tanks are off-limits.

Though their cannons are named
do not speak their names
above a whisper.

DARTH VADER
DONKEY PUNCH
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

They’ve been tearing through
the prairie like flat havoc
riding heaves of friction,

their treads looping infinity,
their engines jet,
their camo cryptic,

you lose them
in a dust cloud,
their camo dazzling,

some still forest
green, brown, mustard,
and they scramble

what sobriety pools
in the shade of other ordnance
you break beside.

One is in for repair, the turbine
hauled out by another Abrams
that’s equipped like a Hercules

beetle. The process is laborious
and loud. You press a stiff finger
into that plush where your neck

meets your head and hear
the insane hum of planets
and feel as though you have

a way to position your body
so that it may hurt
appropriately, like when a leg

injury forces your arms
into right angles
and your back to a stretcher.

Each bite of the warm
cold cut sandwich drops into your gutless
stomach like a bolide.

The engine’s returned and smears
sound and air behind, almost blows
the decal off the side of the Product truck.

Jesus, this Cyclops has another eye!
And when both open
throttle the world dilates.



About the Poet:

Ryan J. Browne runs Poetry & Pints in Madison, Wisconsin, a reading series that pairs writers and his homebrewed beer. He holds an MFA from The University of Alabama. His first collection is Outside Come In, and poems from that collection and his second manuscript can be found in Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Journal. His favorite bittering hop is Magnum.


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.