The Sound of Sugar...Rob Carney

A Lesson Every Shipwreck Learns Too Late

Boats don’t know they’re boats.
That’s why they can float on the water.

If they knew their anchors weren’t house keys,
knew the waves weren’t their own steady heartbeats . . .

if they knew their sails were only sails
and not them breathing out and in . . .

they’d nosedive down, plunge
suddenly as pocket change

somebody dropped. They’d lie there broken
on the living room floor.

Years from now you could visit them,
put on a wetsuit and air tank,

explore among fish and the coral kaleidoscopes,
the here-and-gone shadows of sharks,

but what do you think you’d find?

That sunken trawler was no treasure boat.
That passenger ferry was a passenger ferry.

Even you, my sloop, you’re ordinary:
sailing along toward your no less ordinary loss.




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....Karen Skolfield

Frost in the Low Areas

The health survey said
he would live to 76 and I, 86.
Something to do with men’s

hearts on their worn old grapevines.
Something to do with their will
to lay down and die. In the westerns,

how glad they were to give their lives
away. Bad guy, if you can’t shoot down
a junebug’s nostril, you don’t stand

much of a chance. Men, thinking
they don’t have to cut power
to a bound-up sawblade.

Just think, Dennis says. Ten years
to yourself. No one stealing
the sheets or the last of the ham.

He says this as we make pesto.
This is how we joke with
each other, ha ha, and then

we kiss. Seriously, he says,
imagine no more socks
on the mantle. My arms

the sharp odor of garlic. Basil.
Parmesan cheese. Tonight,
a frost the herbs

won’t survive. Twilight
we worked the rows,
frantic, our gentleness gone.

Behind us, nothing but stems
and their faint heat. Before us,
the first crisp morning.


About the Poet:
Karen Skolfield’s manuscript Frost in the Low Areas won the First Book Award for Poetry from Zone 3 Press and will be published fall 2013. She is a contributing editor at the literary magazine Stirring and her poems have appeared in 2011 Best of the Net Anthology, Cave Wall, Memorious, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, West Branch, and others. Visit her online at http://www.karenskolfield.blogspot.com/ 


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.