Maple Sugaring
Thomas Reynolds
Or pot of black-eyed peas
Didn’t warrant a touch of sweetening?
Exploding when the fire got too hot.
“All that work for nothing,”
she says, seventy years after
still regretting that maple sugar
What girl among those hills
And hope for better days?
the team down muddy roads
in pursuit of another dollar?
Enough for breakfast tomorrow?
With the dog trailing behind
that bent, split-trunked scrub
___
Thomas Reynolds teaches at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and has published poems in various print and online journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Aethlon-The Journal of Sport Literature, The MacGuffin, Flint Hills Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Potpourri, Ariga, Strange Horizons, Combat, American Western Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Ash Canyon Review, and Orphan Leaf Review. Reynolds' two poems, "Wanda's Fried Chicken and "78s," are included in the book Muscadine Lines: A Southern Anthology.
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Thomas Reynolds