HIGHWAY

Alex Tretbar

Valerius de Saedeleer -- An Orchard In Winter

An Orchard In Winter –– Valerius de Saedeleer




Your friends not being able to find you in winter is like pointing to a dead leaf two years

After it has blown past the window. I mean, yes, they are the facts but they're almost parodic

In what they leave out, a third-party app for determining how heavily surveilled the apron

Up ahead is, how you are enlisted in ensuring its accuracy and when there are no police

Where you were expecting to find police, you wonder who your friends really are

And why you can only find them in winter. Making conversation at many miles

Per hour is what led us to this fence, this enclosure, this vista without a leaf. Hi.




Alex Tretbar wrote the chapbooks According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and 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. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Annulet, Bat City Review, Chicago Review, Coma, Denver Quarterly, Fence, ISSUE, mercury firs, NOIR SAUNA, Protean, Seneca Review, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.