Figure Drawing of a Friend Reading Rimbaud

Alex Tretbar

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party
and your liver had not yet failed. Now I’m trying to recall  

anything at all about the pluot nights, the mornings the color  
of an old bandage. Nothing. Just you standing at the dresser  

with a flame and belt. I’d watch you through a nimbus  
of naked Wednesdays, consciousness set to flutter.  

We survived an entire summer on one Clif Bar  
and Naked Juice per day. I forgive you for everything  

you stole from me. I stole from you, too: small things  
like time and a fondness for slow damage, its hairline  

fractures. You’ll always be a hyena, etc… First heard you  
howl it from my burnt couch, patent leather boots kicked up  

on the sill, toeing green leaves. I think I know what  
it means now: you, I, we, will always be staring  

our own terrible laughters in the eye, forever dogged  
by curiosity. We were not lovers, except in the ways we shared  

space, an intimacy of arms, and how like a sad Verlaine  
you shot me with a gun, filled me with bouqueted bullets.  

You crowned me with such pretty poppies, cracked the spine  
of my physical atlas, furrowed its borders and tributaries  

with mechanical pencils. Discovery is overrated.  
I see you sometimes, encased in the daily absences  

and fullnesses of euphoria, my little falls and springs.  
Hear you, playing guitar at your own funeral, rolling  

the parchments of your unfinished songs into cylinders  
through which dead stars join us in a collapsing distance.  

Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbook 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 is a poetry editor for Bear Review.