from Kansas City Gothic
Coda
i.
This is the silver
cornflower blue I remember, the dog-day
cicadas hypnotized by their own plainsong
and the puppy star barking
from behind my uvula, mouth
filling with the black gold
Achilles’ mother dipped me in
each morning, my own mother’s white noise
machine protecting her sleep
from me, and how I woke at the southern
terminus of Rainbow Boulevard
Coda
ii.
the terminus of Rainbow Boulevard
gets lost in throats of country
clubs and the bent brown neck
of Brush Creek, traditional Latin
Mass harmonizing with the photon
beams of Westwood Radiology
at this nexus of wealth & malaise
throned in tasteless stonecrop—
older now & place-weary I realize
our sickness is a jazz standard
in the Great American Songbook
Coda
xxix.
these backrooms of the watershed
this coffee-web of the Mississippi watershed:
in one of these backrooms all of my selves convene
to weave a hushed conspiracy of place
and we find we cannot turn
our backs to the gadwalls on the stream,
and I find I have to turn
away from the Boston ivy of the retaining wall,
my back up against it I fall into disrepair
oh body I’ve tried to keep you satisfied I’ve tried
to limit your multiplication
Coda
xxx.
to limit your multiplication
quell the impulse to echo
Sevillian architecture,
do not overplan the erection
of one of the world’s sixty
great places, ignore the viral manifest
destiny trailing its erection west,
and when shoppers arrive by car
give them instead of tradable wares
a vantage, a black inverted flower
itching for the head’s twin exit wounds
*
Alex Tretbar is the author of the pamphlet Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). 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, Sixth Finch, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @alex_tretbar
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