from Dogsmind

When the wind blows through a tree it sounds like burning.

CHAPTER 4

My difficult education was multiply knived. Dirt kissed me in a hemisphere of basketballtown, known map, horseshoe latitudinal. The recess in which the steel arch of the padlock rests, a correlate of ocean. Incoming message, are you home, I locked myself in the car, but still I’m driving. The signs are strange here. Some are red, and some are sleepless people.

Chapter one, Ripjohn said as we approached our hotwheels holily. History was lagging behind but still in mouthshot, their karma sweetened with heavy crime. Teeth-holes, likely beautyghoul-belonging, had meanwhile constellated the rainbarrel in which our hotwheels were still very steaming and spinning. We all piled into the car accident.

And manymany rivermiles to go, Ripjohn said to his censer. Whatnow.

I’d like to reconvene and reconsider, History whispered into a hole in Ripjohn’s backward bluewhite conductor cap.

Not east, deadtired, goldenward I drove. Unmournful of Patches, we re-reascended downtown. My claws hooked forward and backback into themselves, so intent was I on outwitting inertial hysteria. Couldn’t see for all the damage to the windshield, but knew the way, could smell it. Coming down from the great big bridge, I gasbraked just in time to hit a supine widget, in the hand of an idiot whom we also hit, killing them instantly. But me. Law wallop all but me.

—

Originally published in peel lit 2.2

—

Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, 2026), According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). He works in the center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early issues of New Letters and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. His recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Annulet, Bat City Review, Callaloo, Capgras, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, full stop, mercury firs, NOIR SAUNA, peel lit, RESOURCES, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.