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 themselves They ever ate—like cannoli shells on slender tubes, …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 …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 …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. …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 her thoughts as the cars speed by. Today, she was watching the sky clear
after an early morning rain that …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, …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
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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 …MORE
BY ANGELA SORBY
Cote d’Azure, 1981
Paloma Picasso stands on the high dive wearing a black maillot. Below her, the photographer forgets the holy spirit’s ascension
as he plunges into concentration: Paloma is vital—her perfume flies off shelves all over France. Above the photographer’s bent head
a moth unspools its thirty hours of life, extending them unconsciously until the patio and pool approach immortality. But the sun’s
having none such truck: it sails past, a thrown hat, its arc so fast the photographer curses. Just out of earshot, a girl in a chador
examines her own knee and remembers how the snow in the Pyrenees —snow she’s never seen—flies skyward when the wind is right,
as if everything could gather, at last, in Allah’s palm. The photographer rubs his eyes and thinks about lunch, bread rising, oranges overheating
and falling from a tree in his backyard, how his wife undoes …MORE
BY CINDY MAY MURPHY
and who last week spent three hours wading through the dregs of the just-drained pond whose former owner had assured him could not support life. Though as the last brown water gave way to grime, he bore witness to the rip-flash of five slivered backs struggling like sharks in sand—mudcats, he called them— all on the verge of a bright, dry death in the inadequate air. For my father, who worked without waders through the afternoon, grappling toward their slick, sharp bodies with bare hands, who twice swallowed pond scum, twice lost a shoe to the suction of sludge, and once fell prone in the mire—a seven pound catfish with skin-piercing fins cradled in his arms. For my father, who rinsed their silt-laced gills and bathed each muck-thick body with a hose, who placed them gently into white buckets of water, called up friends and neighbors, …MORE
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