Alex Tretbar ​
​

Field 61

How do you comport yourself?
Is there an elbow on your shoulder?
Dear diary, I took a polygraph for breakfast. I failed
and I’m sorry, but the bug on your face is your problem.

In order to tell you that its battery is low,
the device employs its battery. I’m low

-ering myself into something of a public
figure. When I’m president I want to grow up.
​
Knowingly, the robins bank right. Dear polygraph,
I lie to my diary every Tuesday. Monday, how do you
employ yourself? Is there a battery in your battery?
When I grow up I want to be a problem. A robin.

---

Field 63

A sea in every way, I want to change
what I want in the face of an occurrence:
first frost on the fourth of a month. An
outage. Why are you telling me this,

asks the ear
of corn.

A pink
equipment

​rotates around a pivot
and crops are watered with sprinklers.
Why are you telling me this? Why
am I out of doors, and occurring?

---

Field 66

A moth and a number
of other moths formed
a circle around the computer
screen in the [insert color]

forest. They
were still, so

still. But
-terflies
​
of the night,
I have seen you
under the sun
and broke my neck in the process.

---

--
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 APARTMENT, Kenyon Review, Sixth Finch, and The Threepenny Review