[see now why we flocked to canopy and slept there, preferring]
see now why we flocked to canopy and slept there, preferring
the upchoke, the hometown bar with a timebomb in its craw
I was always prying upmarket cigarettes from the jackdaw
community, which had been propped up for food stamp
aeons, constructed so as to allow future superhighways
to barrel in polyoptically, I studied the sonnet for centuries
and determined that the octet was the beginning of empire
and within its second season a jingoism predominates
wherein a single blade of foothill sedge is laminated
for the purposes of cataloguing the furthest limit
wherein the fifth cycle of ultrawar finally calms
up: the draftdodgers fucking to death in the sea
if you killed that bird and gave it [to me,] it would mean a lot [to me]
dataflow to national geographic, a frozen sirocco leaching
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[dataflow to national geographic, a frozen sirocco leaching]
dataflow to national geographic, a frozen sirocco leaching
in parvo, my classmates not so much ducking as taking up
arms: palisade, nails, bob wire, a gas, whole elm limbs
when I talk through space I think about how objects
might be used to end lives, I cannot help it, I was trained
in the art of bringing all lines of inquiry to a logical end
I was trained to go to a place and consolidate its dead ends
when I asked quarterbacks how they had done it, how they
had triggered a civic revolution that spanned all genres of video
game, they told me (in a series of recorded but erased interviews)
that they owed everything to the ways in which prefabricated wars
had actually served to blossom their college funds, and to God
in magno, my father's name was eventually known as Bob Wire
through the gearshift, ignition, my bedroom is going to change
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[through the gearshift, ignition, my bedroom is going to change]
through the gearshift, ignition, my bedroom is going to change
a pink teddy bear, balanced on my bicep [sic], sings:
ah what a colorful kitchen, butcher knives and
lemons, James Bond is a leading expert in vehicular
homicide, especially when in command of Soviet mech
the community pool was at the geographical center
of the backlots of four culs-de-sac, very green grass
had grown up from the bell, all the way past the diving
board, the kid who had an Xbox got his hand fucked up by
the bob wire that the neighbor had inexplicably installed
in dense coils within the shadows of his mailbox, at night
we snuck around in the kitchen with our waterguns
and accidentally heard our parents having sex
in eight hundred sixty days
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ALEX TRETBAR is the author of the chapbooks 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 issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. His recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Annulet, Bat City Review, Callaloo, Capgras, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Full Stop, ISSUE, mercury firs, NOIR SAUNA, peel lit, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.