WRONG TREES

What day is it?

“...and the icelight reflecting from the marquee gave me cause to undress”

And then went down to the store.

Secretly, all carpets harbor red underbellies.

Who’s there? Glowing windmills bowing at the feet of desiccated hexagons.

And I can hear myself breathing, downhill.

Rivers are gaining in popularity.

A ghost of argument arrives in corporeal agreement with your palate of occident.

While from the cabin I shuffle my microchips.

Sneaks out, a gray paste from the ells and corners of belief held firm as a pistol grip.

The brushed aluminum had high hopes in the early annals of product development.

Avoidant diseases have undergone screening at the usual film festivals: a silver palm, a wondrous
rash, other planes with which we hope to intersect.

The skyline is to the left and unvisitable.

Unmistakably hungry, we mistake the lake for the end of all electricity.

The hostile edge of the city trembles into doormat territory.

Tip spaceward and algae or cloud or vein surgery. “Knock, knock.”

The scoreboard is illegible from 1264.

There is a model for this, a portrayal of mayors. Multiple wrong trees and a fence made of doors.

We shall stand here along flowering horizons, troubling our septa and begging each other to sing.

I have unlaced my cowboy boots and stepped into the mussel.

Where damselflies flicker in the noble yarrow.

My love stole a cherry tomato from the community garden, but I cannot partake of it.

Salvos report for work.

“Marooned” kept cropping up.

We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for [ ], selling flowers and water under the highway.

Someone was apparently radicalized over donuts. Someone was running late.

We didn’t even go. Something happened.

A plastic owl careened into Harm’s Way.

Turn up the war, I’m trying to sleep.

I have connections in heaven, you know.

Don’t make me regret myself.

Village despair is cicada-brown, but I’m not tired of it yet.

“Who’s there?”

Went to the store for umbrellas and brie.

My, the colorful streamers, and those who wish dark coins upon us.

I require abnormal things to happen to me. I require well-placed stains.

We’ve boiled the disputation of valleys down to a problem of grammars.

We’ve censured our children, forbidden them from going door to door for cups of salt.

But your transparent clock is completely unreadable, and anyway its fours are skysick mendicants.

Human resources have caught wind of us.

So, the neighbor’s dog barking and whimpering all day—is it a stimulant or a depressant?

And when I go through your pockets, is there anything sharp that’s gonna stick me?

The critic sat on their compendium of petits fours for far too long. We deserved better.

Just because I don’t read magazines doesn’t mean you can withhold food from me.

Neither. It’s an unwell nightstand.

We don’t look back at our future. Too many walls.

There is a sword. And there is a sword and a sword.

This means peace.

Start it over.

I don’t like this part of the song.

A cold wind, yes, but it carries the smell of fried food, thankfully.

And the grass speaks to me through its veils of borderline personality.

But I worry I’ll miss something while I take off my shirt.

Hello?

“It’s me, the panic field. The coat of dimensional white. The screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot.”

Alex Tretbar wrote the chapbooks According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and 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 work appears or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, Annulet, Bat City Review, Coma, Denver Quarterly, Fence, ISSUE, mercury firs, Protean, Seneca Review, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.