Charles Bukowski died sixteen years ago today, March 9. Just a few years before his death, the hyperprolific Buk sent a startup literary journal a small bundle of poems—and a friendly warning, of sorts. In honor of his memory, we here at Sycamore Review have decided to open up the archives and share with you one of those poems, as well as its accompanying “letter to the editor.” Click below on “…MORE” to read Bukowski’s “One More Day” and to see a true Buk artifact. (We’re pretty sure the attached doodle is a “good doggie,” but extra marks to anyone with a more creative interpretation.) …MORE
BY RITA MAE REESE
The word is the making of the world.
Wallace Stevens
It’s a filmstrip afternoon
and we’re all grateful
to the humming projector
in the middle of our desks,
the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult.
There’s a vague promise of revelation
from the title
and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice
calling from a house
carrying within it our freedom not to answer.
Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress
is falling asleep
at her father’s desk, turning into
Alice in Wonderland
as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar.
The Madhatter and Jabberwocky
tell her to lure
the letters into a trap so they can beat them
to death with mallets.
We’d like to see that. Without words
no one could tell us what to do.
We know grammar is just a byproduct,
like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew
too fast for its own good
and that history is a series of conspiracies
by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is
falling asleep on the …MORE
BY LIZZIE HUTTON
At 28 I saw that my flat flowered ring had cracked.
At 35: spring’s slaughter house. The old
stone house, its wild kept food.
They told me it was made of rose gold, how I liked
the name. Furred poppy stems and jagged leaves
persisting from the white-washed cracks.
That “rose” more real to me than just plain
gold, although the jewelers told me—
weeds, they nodded in their place
Their open-faced red heads—that mine was of a type
once common, inexpensive. My boy glued there
to see the baby pigs released, swell down the hill
To forage on their short blunt freckled legs for fallen nuts.
A “cigar ring” they called it, made of giant
sheets of heated gold.
Even so, the sloping pebbled road was beautiful
at night. The wallpaper designs were rolled on
in repeating frames. I couldn’t tell, though, if
Their squeals were greedy grunts or pained—then
machine-sliced and cut to size, formed into rings
and put to harden—even wondered if it was …MORE
 In his collection of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, writer Michael Martone recounts how he and some friends would write poems for hire in Bloomington, Indiana. “We would go up to people on the street and ask them if they would like a poem today. On any subject, we said. In any form. We’d write it on the spot in pencil on a legal pad or on a portable typewriter we’d tote along. Charge a quarter. We called ourselves RKO Radio Poems and our slogan was “A Poem Must Not Mean But Be 25 [cents].”
Martone passed through Sycamore’s hometown of West Lafayette last night as part of his 4th Annual Double-Wide World Tour of Indiana and spent some time with us at a local bar. We offered him a quarter to compose a poem for us, which he …MORE
BY BARBARA CLAIRE FREEMAN
If now you cannot hear me it is because we are breaking up because
our borders are not secure because the iPod interferes with your pace
maker because there is no reason to worry about the past when the past
may never come because no one else will remember how damp
the page smells after the network goes offline. One day you will forget
the law of flood, you will take it back while the speaker behind the mirror
leads you further away from lines that began with first person address:
“let the forgetting begin.” If now you cannot read him it is because distance
is what you lost once and now must drink. It is almost dark and the wind
off the river proves a field for knots of clumsy and impenetrable English
confronting the translator of Persian lyric poetry their stanzas having
become an abandoned house awaiting foreclosure as evidence
of the decade’s debacle …MORE
BY JESSICA LOVE
My brother won’t eat the Costco strawberries,
twenty giant strawberries in a carton the length
of a twelve-pack. He sips his Coke and shakes
his curly head. Not cool, he says. I’ve seen
apples smaller than those berries. We watch the storm
together, at Mom’s new place, watch as it turns from
bluster to bite like a violent drunk slowly
waking up. We lean against the couch
and look out onto the deck. Mud sloshes
down the flowerpots. And then a hearty sheet
of water falls against the glass and we can see
nothing but colors blurred together. It is how
I imagine an impressionist depicting Spring but I
am no art major. Museum junky, yes. This morning
I studied every Mondrian on the wall while my brother,
inspired by the abstraction, scribbled plans
for a carbon-neutral house party. I wouldn’t be invited,
he informed me. I lived too far away. Win some,
lose some, he said as if he owned composure,
and I let him. …MORE
BY JIM TILLEY
With a Mozart concerto in the background
and little to do as I waited for the next available associate
to be with me shortly, I began to comprehend
how one infinity can be larger than another,
not in the sense of the mathematician
who can prove that rational numbers are countable
and real numbers are not, but my patience,
which I am continually thanked for,
the next available associate undoubtedly
unaware of my infinite fascination with Mona Lisa’s
excised eye staring upside down
from the minute hand, obliterating the smile at half past
the hour, according to the artisanal timepiece
my wife brought back from Florence last year.
A larger infinity is what my neighbor’s cow
exhibits every day lying near the split-rail fence,
alone with …MORE
BY KC TROMMER
For A. H.
The brain is three pounds of soft mass. It’s the consistency
of pudding, one doctor told me, which put me off
pudding afterwards. He gestured, motion of the finger
going through it, and even made the wet sound
for something—the knife?—sliding in. Easy to make a mistake.
They worked in the most primitive part of the brain,
the area that governs pleasure. And because
it was the brain, they kept me awake for surgery.
I didn’t know—they hadn’t told me—what would happen when
they took their instruments in to pry the tumor
away from where it nestled against the base of my skull.
When they were close, they leaned in, hovering, faces taut
in anticipation of the glorious moment and so it came:
a soft touch to the reptilian brain and delight sprung out,
shooting my body with ecstasies. I shook the table, silver metal
of their instruments tittering as my eyes rolled …MORE
BY DANIEL BRENNER
Form will save us from
Looking like scoundrels
Or worse
Being taken to icy waters
& rescued from secondhand
Remnants of trees
After the war they dripped ice
& then got warm again
They commended each other
& were embarrassed
They wrote cookbook after cookbook
As if to say here is something better
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Daniel Brenner grew up in PA and currently lives and writes in NJ. His first book of poems, The Stupefying Flashbulbs, won the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2006.
BY LUCIA PERILLO
“Let’s all watch as the world goes to the devil!”
—Fritz Lang, 1926
She must have written Beauty’s how-to book:
see the isotopes inside her veins,
her literal veins, lit up under her skin,
her liquidmetal jumpsuit skin,
when the mad scientist throws the switch
and her whole vascular system shines. I don’t know
how we fabricate the silver from this gray-
on-gray concatenation of flanges
sitting on her throne with the electrostatic waves
twitching into her limbs,
her knees and breasts like walnut shells:
she’s an armadillo/hybrid/roller derby queen.
And we who try to grip Futura in our hands
find she is like water. Nothing there
when we open them up
yet see the wetness on my palms—
at certain times of day they too are silver
and if sunlight hits them right they are ablaze.
But any iridescence I wear is thin veneer
whereas the robot wears hers deep deep deep
in her titanium bones, which we’ll see in the end
when she hangs toasted on the …MORE
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CURRENT ISSUE
Winter/Spring 2010
Fiction by Patricia Engel. Interviews with Rita Dove and Carl Phillips. And the winning entry in the 2009 Wabash Prize for Poetry.
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