Field 29
There is a desire I feel sometimes in the holding
cell whose walls are a collage of apple barcode
stickers (because where else can you put them)
to destroy the cell. Past a certain point
I cannot abide certain points. I would prefer
to simplify your elaborate cargo system.
At least there are windows in the desert.
At least there are apples in the lunches.
And so long as I am here (the deep end) please place me
under supervision, near and privy to the inescapable
fact: in this world, when we move it is the way
leaves move in vacuum, neither wind nor mind.
Field 39
In the time it has taken the gentlepeople sitting far
apart from each other on the airplane to discuss
and exhaust the merits of fantasy, a new school
of architecture was erected, hailed, destroyed.
I have already logged, mind you, in the nectared notebooks,
just how sane I had imagined myself to be when perusing
tarot apps on the avenue, unhopelessly astrologizing my
-self back into a life whose margins were growing eyes.
That, my forgotten friends, is the involution of paranoia.
That is a flower, and beside it other flowers. To the interior
designer it may concern: may my monogonal coffin be bedecked
and/or buttressed with sight. May my eyes (not crying!) grow eyes.
Field 51
Open then, undersung
and siloed embouchure. Clod
for a mouth, you conspire to make
of what, of wheat, a loveseat.
Ripe with icelight, the scarecrowless rows
between whose plastic sheets the psychotics (I
and me (and you)) worriedly till the blue. We are,
each other, effigy. So of optic—oar and waterward
loves—let us eat. When a tooth breathes
harvest is mistaken for a scythe. You, my reply:
the flaming reed burns both the cylinder
and, unerring, the ear looks into the eye.
Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbook Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). As a Writers for Readers Fellow with the Kansas City Public Library, he teaches free writing classes to the community. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Narrative, and The Threepenny Review.