4 Poems by Alex Tretbar
Field 44
Top-heavy, empty pail, where is your trash?
The rough landing was reclassified as a crash
for there have been too many sterile seasons
since the skeletonizing leaf beetles (working
in shifts, worrying on the weld) tested the fences
of our archipelagized future, which turned out
not to include us. And when we clanged together
in the deep vats of the jelly factory sliding into the river,
my rags and boots were purply ruined with an imprecision
you referred to malapropismically as "random." What you meant,
dear pail, is that the insect dominion had ransomed us, at such a cost
that neither of us adorns any longer the missing edge of the table.
The Water Ring
these halogen lanterns installed inside my medicine
cabinet are new apparently, or the cabinet
maybe isn't mine, did you consider that yet
and/or their whiteness is of the same barred intensity
of the streetlights in my two-dimensional home
town, quiet as a water ring, the storm was blowing
a white dust across the highway and my audio book about
eisenhower was lagging out, I wasn't listening
to anything but the blanket I forgot to bring
and there were eight freezing cattle
and the steering wheel dissolved in my hands
when I saw the bare tree line beyond them
so I promised to never tell anyone
any more things about myself, but I'm going
to a club tonight because I've never been to one
alone, and I have four days to figure everything out
[ushered me into silence as though it were language]
ushered me into silence as though it were language
which is a system organized around its own attraction
to the exhaustion of itself, I am a stable convalescent
tearing across the environment, four-wheelying
like my son depended on it, blue flax in his hair
we hunted crow in summer, I taught him how to
identify fifteen thousand forms of fire
the rarest of which you see in mountain
just brute force it, the escutcheon said
as she adorned your body with signs
your elbows were metal flanges
you were trained from an early age to oh
your hands were great white bandages
you were trained from an early age to open
Field 82
How many needles will fit in the head
of an angel (mostly just trying to turn
it off). Seen a system.
An axe, a sun.
I was circuitboarding.
Didn't want to.
Made a scene,
the best boys.
Asunder, I
wanted to
or in the feathereflection
or a gunnysack pincushion.
Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, 2026), According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). He works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early volumes of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Recent writing has appeared in Capgras, Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, Works & Days, and elsewhere.