Alex Tretbar
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. His poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, Sixth Finch, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
[36]
And it either must end.
And we must fend off the police while the art is being made.
And/or begin in bewilderment.
And a red pencil is limning my eyes.
And what a grand soil I imagined in the stereospace.
And a pastor walk into a bar.
And the skyline was pickled in the interest of capital.
And the state that I am in.
And it was a new form of consciousness.
And you want to explore the email.
And we talked about tennis at the protest.
And the bespoke, stylized typeface.
And combination for the sake of combination.
And these are new forms of consciousness.
And the blue sky smelled like a warm flower.
And when I lived on the coast it was decided that I was normal.
And we must turn to art while the police are continuously produced.
And our mothers consigned us to a bin labeled “Unreadable.”
And the label had a label.
And when I lived in the country it was decided that I was normal.
And the automatically generated contributions to discourse are compelling.
And I read Proust in the porta potty at the marathon.
And it was automatically generated.
And there were seventeen requests in the suicide note.
And often I identify with the lamplit branch.
And the common cold colonized the vulnerable expanse of eyelid.
And the suburbs were respectful when they deprived me of my weapons.
And within this context "normal" just means "earthly."
And we have applied “lucky” to the wrong noun.
And, unexpectedly, a lightbulb in the canopy.
And it took me 22 years to find a vein.
And the label’s label had a label.
And it was automatically generated.
And two coasts walk into a bar.
And I am fewer than twelve million years old.
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