TWO POEMS by Alex Tretbar

Oversight

It was December and the orange leaves of the water oak all faced the ground identically, as of hawks. I held vigil over a thousand living mice. There were rainbowed braids of wire and oil derricks behind the paintings in the museum. I curled my tail around my body—its uneven distribution among the snow and flowerbanks. Data swam, gasping into the practice space. And I staggered through the boroughs, sharing needles with dockworkers on bedrolls in cat food factories. The little matchstick flame shivered thousandfold in the metal bins and assemblages. Triangles of people held my attention. Puzzled by silence, stillness, I occupied cat’s cradles of bus routes and reverb. I stroked carafes and wanted to get fucked again, as copper thieves spoke lovingly to fences in the inner southeast. My two-dimensional urn: I carried it everywhere. I licked my eyes awake. At protests I studied curious waveform patterns, observed a fiveness of quadrants and a squaring of ovals. I followed myself on Twitter. I googled “cat food factory.” When the leaves began to fall I straightened my tie and googled “cat food factory near me.”

Atavistic Reflections on Home Improvement

None of the cabinet doors
in my home stay open without human
intervention. This equates to fewer

than two moments before the future
shuts open. I was briefly there,
long enough to learn that all good

things are assembled slowly.
It was similar to the way
you don’t know if you have a head

-light out until you confront yourself
in the smudged plate glass window
of a gas station when you pull up

to wait in idle for the dealer.
I’ll find out soon, when winter taps
its reflex hammer, whether the speed

of sound can warm me. 
Until then I’ll keep moving
the canned goods from cabinet

to stomach, where they slow
dissolve into a maudlin montage
of naps. It’s cute—until you realize

sleep is just the passing recognition
that the leaves this time of year
somehow rise before they fall

into the ancient pattern.