The Sound of Sugar....Scott Poole

A Beautiful Flower

Don’t call her vagina a beautiful flower.
Please don’t.
If her vagina were a beautiful flower
then she would have bees in her pants
all the time
and it would be impossible to hold her
close enough
to be intoxicated
by the gossamer tendrils of her perfume.
One cannot be swept away by subtle
drops of dew welling at the corners
of her eyes when you reveal
your most vulnerable,
baby-chick-softness
sentiments
if your dearest love
is hopping around
like a River Dancer on crack,
waving her hands madly
in front of her crotch.
Then, all you’ve got is
is a screaming freak-out
ripping her pants off in public
and that would not be a flower,
my friend,
that would be porn.



“A Beautiful Flower” from The Sliding Glass Door © Scott Poole 2011 by permission of
Colonus Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.



About the Poet:

Scott Poole is the author of two books of poetry, The Cheap Seats and Hiding from Salesmen. Poole is also the resident poet of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s weekly show, “Live Wire!” and the founding director of both Wordstock, Portland’s Annual Festival of the Book and Get Lit!, Spokane’s Annual Book Festival. Currently, he is a software developer who lives in the town he grew up in, Vancouver, Washington with his wife and two children.



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....Lucy Biederman

ALL OUR HITS ARE ACCIDENTS

The dead are dead—
we can do whatever we want.
At no station on earth do they stand
and wait. Have we crammed this barren land
to spite them? They might not recognize what they’d return to haunt,
they’ve missed so much.
Someone said they liked the color red
so we painted the station, the trains, the casually panicking bus.










About the Poet:

Lucy Biederman is a doctoral student at the University of Louisiana and the author of a chapbook, The Other World (dancing girl press, 2012). Poems of hers are forthcoming or have appeared recently in ILK, Shampoo, Many Mountains Moving, Gargoyle, Ping Pong, Word Riot, and The Tusculum Review.


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. 

Two Important Utah Poets Present Their Work

Poets Rob Carney and Michael McLane will present from their works at Cedar City's Main St. Books (25 N. Main St.) at 7pm on Monday, November 4, 2013. A reception and book signing will immediately follow at nearby Artisans Art Gallery (94 W. Center St.).

Refreshments will be available.

This event is free and made possible by sponsors Main St. Books, Artisans Art Gallery, and Sugar House Review.

Rob Carney is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Story Problems (Somondoco Press) and Home Appraisals (Plan B Press). His poem "Seven Pages from The Book of Sharks" just won first prize in Terrain.org's poetry contest; the latest issue is available on line now. He teaches at UVU and lives in Salt Lake City.

Michael McLane earned an MFA in Creative Writing and is finishing an MS in Environmental Humanities. He is the review editor for Sugar House Review and a co-editor of the new journal saltfront. His work has been published in numerous journals including Interim, Laurel Review, Colorado Review, Sidebrow, and Denver Quarterly. He is the Literary Program Officer for the Utah Humanities Council.

Please take advantage of this unique opportunity to hear two exceptional Utah poets present their work.

The Sound of Sugar....Brian Gilmore

Billy Bathgate (for chico)

 

    all i’ve got is this picture.

it could have been van der zee

gordon parks,

oggi ogburn fresh from

a chancellor williams’

shoot,

we are capable boys;

innocent,

up some small mountain

in the summertime

from that swamp of a city,

we couldn’t juggle balls

didn’t know any gangsters,

all we had was ice cold michelob and red juicy melon

holy like water.

we didn’t even know about the rattlesnakes

that i’ve now been told are all over that mountain.

all i’ve got is this picture.

    i could call up the crew,

though some of them are gone away now like wisps of smoke.

others are here but just floating on the skyline like kite

without string.

we were capable boys,

looking into the future as if we

would live long like frederick douglass

or c.l.r. james.

did i mention the michelob?

the red juicy melon

holy like water?

and how about those rattlesnakes?

all around us always now that we know

they are there.

all i’ve got is this picture.

unbreakable smiles.

lean frames.

polo shirts gripping some young

boys soon to be walking tight rope

without poles.

    it’s there, all of it.

    ice cold michelob.

    melon holy like water.

    rattlesnakes.

    we couldn’t juggle balls.

    didn’t know any gangsters.

we were capable boys,

all i’ve got is this picture.

About the Poet:

Washington D.C.'s Brian Gilmore is a poet, writer, and public interest lawyer. He currently teaches at the Michigan State University College of Law. He is the author of two collections of poetry: "elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem," and "Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: poem for Duke Ellington." His poetry, essays, and reviews have been widely published in newspapers, magazines and journals; his honors include - Individual Artist Award - Maryland State Arts Council - 2001, and 2003, Pushcart Prize nominee 2007, Willow Books Award nominee (fiction) - 2013. He is also a regular columnist with the Progressive Media Project where he writes about politics, law, and culture. His blog is the chocolate city review.

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....Randall R. Freisinger

Alien Sex

I stood on the porch that night,
the lights from a parent’s car just vanishing
at the end of the street. My friend and I
had been to a movie, It Came From
Outer Space. Above me, the stars
had lost their innocence. My block

throbbed with threats from distant galaxies.
Because I was late, I entered the house
quietly, hoping to sneak unnoticed upstairs.
All seemed normal enough for the usual
Saturday night of too much drinking—
My parents, asleep, he in his chair

in front of the guttering television screen,
she splayed out on the studio couch
in a nearby room. How quickly
the known world can turn strange.
I knew what it was when I saw it
on the living room floor. I had swiped

them from Crown Drugs and filled them
with water to ambush passing cars. This one,
viscous, lay damply coiled on the rug
like the sloughed husk of a newborn alien
that must have streaked from deepest space
even as my friend and I hunkered down

in the Southtown Theater’s three-dimensional
darkness. My brain, agitated,
could come to only two conclusions,
one so fantastic my mind refused
the gross picture it posed. The only credible
way to explain it: Extraterrestrials.

Either way, I had no choice but to destroy
the evidence, picking the sticky chrysalis
skin up with a thick wad of Kleenex
and shoving it deep in the kitchen trash
right alongside my own astonishment.
Upstairs, I tried hard to distract myself

with prayer, but that wet rubber
crackled in my mind’s air like static
and there was no getting through
that night to the starry kingdom of God.
Next morning at breakfast, I studied them

carefully through my new 3-D glasses,
my father in profile with his coffee
and Sunday paper, Mother a bit
groggy at the stove, tending
pans of bacon and eggs. Nothing
amiss: no telltale scales on his hands,
no saw-toothed tail switching beneath

her gossamer robe. All through breakfast
I stayed vigilant, my eyes as sharp
as Flash Gordon’s, my mind hyper
with the ammo of fight or flight.
After breakfast I planned to search
in our backyard for the crater, the mother ship

I knew it would contain.
I would bravely destroy the invaders.
Then it would be my most solemn duty
to inform the world: From now on
here, on Planet Earth, things would never,
ever again be the same.






About the Poet:

Randall R. Freisinger's poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes. He has four collections of poems: Running Patterns (1985 Flume Press National Chapbook Competition winner), Hand Shadows  (Green Tower Press, 1988), Plato’s Breath (May Swenson Poetry Prize, Utah State University Press, 1997), and Nostalgia’s Thread: Ten Poems on Norman Rockwell Paintings  (Hol Art Books, 2009).   

He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Since 1977 he has lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he is Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric, Literature, and Creative Writing in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University.


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....Joy Gaines-Friedler

Returns

It’s coming upon a year my friend sat
         Lotus style
in her Hospice bed, said, it’s all so terrible

and, now I know love.
And, my neighbor called to say his wife
        is leaving him.

I admit slugging through with only
a feathery slip of a word—
sorry.

Lately a kind of dividend is paid
when nothing changes overnight

when the phone remains silent
and no conduit of news diminishes us.

That exoskeleton that can grow around me
    keeping sweetness out?
I’m sorry for that too.

When my friend, thin as a wing,
looked at me and said,
this must be so hard on you,

I shook-off that boney layer.

I let that be her last gift to me.

My neighbor keeps everything clean,
    fixes everything;
has dropped his wife’s name; turned her into a pronoun.

She’s living with someone else,
he says without my asking.

Every morning a chickadee flings itself
against the window—fighting its reflection—
defending against itself.

Today, at the mail box, my neighbor said,
she’s not coming back.





About the Poet:

Joy Gaines-Friedler’s work is widely published in journals, including Rattle, Margie, The New York Quarterly, and others. Her first full-length book of poetry, Like Vapor, was published by Mayapple Press (2008). Joy teaches creative writing for non-profits in the Detroit area including Springfed Arts and Common Ground where she works with families of victims of homicide.




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....Andrew C. Gottlieb

Ritual Leavings


We went to your stone and waited.
      The snow showed our past,
             gave us away in our giving.

Block letters, bright sun, frozen grass.
     Winter was listening
           while we lined our things

along the short granite cliff.
     Three chocolates in lockstep,
          a latte, a small happy Buddha,

the three dollar kind in red plastic
     with his bag and his look.
          A small book of poems.

The only thing missing: the photos,
     your smiling. This losing
           dismantles our notions of wholeness:

cold fingers, a frivolous mingling,
     a single crow hunched in an oak.
        Who’s not lonely in the cold?

The trees have retreated excepting the firs
      with their green skirts and thin leaves.
           Needles, the decline, goodbyes, pine

scent. You’ve left us behind
     to a ritual leaving. A comb,
         a coin, an orchid, bone whistles.

A milling of beliefs at the coldest
      of stone, our clinging past
            like a piling, a raft, and a rope.






About the Poet:

Andrew C. Gottlieb works and writes in Irvine, California, and loves the southwest climate, though he spent 9 years in Seattle and misses the rain and ferries. His work is published in many
journals and in his chapbook, Halflives (New Michigan Press, 2005). These poems are from Ritual Leavings, a recent semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Award. Andrew does a pretty good job at his day gig, but avoids it as much as possible; instead spending time outdoors with his wife and two stepchildren, or with his books: reading and writing.   



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.