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Alex Tretbar

Poisson d’avril
​after a collage by John Ashbery

A paper fish has been following me
& by that I mean it’s part of me.

The fish whispers kick me
& all of earth’s children

do so. I treat All Fools’
Day like any other

holiday: with a day off
kilter, to the races, beat.

And I tell myself the cure for pain
describes itself in the form of a circle

perforated, numbered, finite—a lie
that hasn’t been swallowed yet

or whose liar forgot to tell it,
bedlam budding

everywhere like hell
trapped inside of a matchstick.

Not A to Z, understand, but Z
to A again. I gently shake

my head at the funeral
which is made possible in part

by the bequest of many flowers.
A train leaves Chicago traveling sixty

billion miles per hour, it is one hundred
& thirteen degrees Fahrenheit,

and I want to crawl
into a hole. How long will it take

for every world to pour back
into a thimble? The women of earth cry

Come back to the light but I thought
I was already there.​


Alex Tretbar won the 2022 PEN America Prison Writing Contest in Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Edward Bunker Prize in Fiction. His poems and nonfiction appear in or are forthcoming from Bat City Review, Poetry Northwest, Meridian, Buckmxn Journal, HAD, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
​
Website: alextretbar.com
Twitter and Instagram: @alex_tretbar

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