[16]

Is your shower straightforward.

I'm asking which drug you are addicted to.

Is there a chance I’ll be burned.

Because it matters which drug you are addicted to.

Patrons request their sadness to be encoded.

You're yawning so often that I'm thinking.

In our poems.

You're dopesick.

Dear officer, I am enamored of downtowns.

And we shall turn to diacetylmorphine.

But nothing really happens there.

Power is not straightforward.

It’s always dark when I leave the museum.

Issues forth, a 24-karat needle.

In which the music piped from the speakers.

New user, I don’t spend hours in bathrooms.

Confuses me. I am all for cross-pollination.

In search of a vein or word.

Of artistic disciplines, but it’s too much.

And I regret that the volume of arrests.

Nothing, really, happens there.

Precludes a more personal incarceration.

New user, let's grab coffee and peruse the economy.

Whereby you might’ve gained an understanding.

Of words.

---

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. 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 is a poetry editor for Bear Review.

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