ALEX TRETBAR / 6 UNBODIED POEMS
Unbodied Poem in Which the Speaker Is Blessed With a Sudden Cash Infusion and Quits Their Job, Changes Their Name to Blank and Moves Far Away, Did You Think It Could Have Gone Another Way, Did You Think There Was a Way to Escape the Body, There Wasn’t, It Followed the Speaker to a Top Bunk in a Hostel Dorm With Eleven Other Bunks, Eleven Other Speakers, and When They Were Alone Sometimes the Purple Sun Through the Dirty Window Managed to Defray the Compound Headache Which Had Also Followed Them, the Headache With Eyes and a Job and a Name, Did You Think It Could Have Gone Another Way
unbodied poem in which the speaker reconsiders non-lineated, minisculated entitlement, by which they enter a minor house of sorts, where apple and table are humble, as of still life, and in the interest of triangulation i approach them, but there was a wrongness about it, the red and brown tableau, the blending of tenses, mixing of mediums, arias overhead, how the speaker dissolved into an eye, an I from which we honor collective space, abstraction accompanied me, a worm upheld me, it emerged from its house of apple, the aspect of everything was small, warm, flamelike and kind, the way my true eye color took up a revolutionary cause, ripped out its boutonniere, and we nursed a candle in the bell of the reader’s ear
unbodied poem recorded in the air, distributed pagewise, look at us now and then, drunk with prairie, nostalgic of how it hit the system, hailed us along the contested territory of passphrase and blood-brain barrier, actual gunshots, virtual clinic, did you think it could have gone another way, nodding out in the flowerbanks, the example domain, nephews astral astray, a blue eye mistaken for bruise, and we shall turn to parody, a computation of sentence, at nine the heat clicked off, poem in which the unmanned speaker shakes their bridle, the speaker requires a pilot, virtual gunshots, actual clinic, blue like light of pilot, poem in search of a poem, poem in which the pilot centers their fragments long enough to form a sunburnt hand and compass, needle north-flush, azimuth dew-bright and here
unbodied poem in which it doesn’t matter the order in which words appear, and began to hum, my non-negotiable instrument of repayment, an update is required, has been scheduled, I cannot find a song commensurate, the drug is better in hand than vein, I could’ve told you that, is it okay if I call you “Name,” zoom in, their artlessness, their pocketspace and windowglare, the average birth weight of an American baby is made public and no clichés are present, endlife dependent, comedown contingent upon whatever song is playing, offset eyes and hiccup, twelfth nap, whatever’s in the branches scares me, orange and non-negotiable, the biopsy told me so, dear plainclothes cop, small registrar of entrap, I could’ve sold you that, when you lie with me take off your goddamn hat
unbodied poem in which it’s obvious there’s no body, no one questions a negative space, its ripeness and crackling potential, the vacuum it represents and calls you to fill, but when we are told that the empty room is nameless, untitled, unendowed, we begin to gather at the threshold, or rather a threshold begins to form as we gather around what we take to be the limits of the nonbody, for what is actually controversial is the status of the name, the title, the appellation, the function of designation, because we are unsettled by a body without a name, or, more troubling, something lacking both, something whose dimensions are delimited via typographic gloss and embellishment, ancillary footnotes, feet on which the nonbody can stand and hail us, walk away from us, apply for a job, join the army, die, an unnamed nonbody defined by the named bodies surrounding it, the bodies reading it, knocking on it, shining penlights into the apertures where its pupils should be, they cannot help themselves, they give it a name, they henceforth know it as “Hello”
[untitled, unbodied poem]1
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. Poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in APARTMENT, Bat City Review, Coma, Iterant, Poetry Northwest, Protean, Sixth Finch, and The Threepenny Review.