Where the Sugar Dollars

Where the sugar dollars
have not yet reached is

not far: look no farther
than the cane fields,

where a boy wields
a machete half his size.

What is the size of
injustice? Can it be

sliced in half, then that
half slashed? Where does

all that sugar go? Why
do we call it sweet?

Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019), Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Threepenny Review, Poetry magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere.

She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.