Alex Tretbar
Melting Down the Spoon (In Light of Suspicious Circumstances)
We suspected a vastness at play, a directive: abide in soft hardness, in truncation. Foster community via rapidly scheduled archipelagization. Remember how good the morning will feel, not to have to. Terror as medium and discipline. Celebrate the coming of the knowledge of what is worthy of celebration, long before its coming. Long before its coming, I had convinced ourselves to jettison exculpatory evidence. We balked and published our diaries across the territory anyway, enjoying the many enjoyments of our condition. Did you think evolution would require nothing of you? Did you think your disorder singular and isolated to your kitchen? Once we began to molt we suspected otherwise. We suspected a smallness at play, and so we minimized. We canvassed discontent and perused dry gardens replete with bone. We supplanted clerks and requested negative wages. Little chants, took up, found themselves concordant with archive. I stored my most insane specimens of laughter in filing cabinets that were empty and did not belong to me. This is what I had told ourselves about, over the little poppings of controlled greasefire, and when you kissed me good afternoon in the bank vault, countless millennia after the seventeenth embargo, I looked into the camera and terrified an audience of zero.
Whatever Remains of the Idea Is Likely Unreachable
These worlds, they don't take place in the world. Did you note my passage through them, walking past you sometimes in the malls and data (which are variable)? Goodbye to them. I am picking my teeth in the uncharred aftermath: everything survived, not including you. No one is here now to police my spit and yet I am afraid, I spit in private, in the stairwelled closets and privies. My siblings in rumor and legend, I am trekking back through disappointment to the beforeparties, and along the way I see you over and over. I almost stop at the sight of your misplaced joys but, knowing better, blow my paychecks everywhere. It's funny how when the reporters ask us about the bedrock and drunk tanks and shipyards, we tell them we used to read penny novels in the fens, lazing and squinting under halos of oxidation. I understand—now—how reality amplifies psychosis. And how the bee flies into the burr mill, in search of (and with a nod to) painless boohoo.
And Approached with Six Dread Flowers in My Hair
Men were chopping down the tree in my front yard. A squared-away hoard of squirrel fell. Blue jays barked. I spoke to the crew about rest and relaxation, but when we thought of who might hear us, we stopped speaking. A public servant then told us, their face so close to mine, that we were to be removed. When I said who to their eyes, I detected a similarity between the servant's right levator labii superioris and a desert I had seen through a bulletproof window once: romantic trains ferried cargo across the wastes of each. I looked up and something else looked down.
Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, forthcoming 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 issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, La Lancha, mercury firs, Works & Days, and elsewhere.