three poems

by Trapper Markelz

Overcoming the Loss of a Friend

I don’t know all the pieces of a horse. The price

of their hardware, the pace of their gate, the speed

of a rodeo buck, the temperature of their breath,

clouds blooming mini snowstorms along a wooden fence line

in early frost. The sound of a shod hoof on Florida beach sand,

like a dropped couch, like clearing a grave, like digging for bivalves

in low surf. The speed of a buck as it sends a flying skull

against the only rock anywhere on this fucking white sand beach,

sharp as a razor clam, as bloody as an unshod hoof in a thorn thicket.

I don’t know all the sounds in a hospital, the different tones

of fake living or real dying, the temperature of a water glass,

the taste of a reusable plastic straw, tears blooming

over Mother’s Day bouquets as a machine does the breathing.

The sound of a cell phone dial and the pace of a few last words

I’ll barely remember. I don’t know all the pain in this world,

the price of head scars, the pace of change, the speed

of a galloping stallion, but I’ll keep doing the things

we’ve always done. I’ll hang on for you.

I’ll wrap my arms around Pegasus and hope he’s more

than just a horse running off a cliff.

Yes, Apples, and Blood, and Light

Eat the apple slices before they go brown, she says,

it is another thing to do, she says, before we read

& write and do arithmetic–not on our fingers,

but on paper we’ve bought–shredded, chipped,

poured in a pile, scooped onto a ship that belches

black earth through humpback whale homes,

propellers that streak a football field gash

through microplastic garbage patches

on the way to locks & canals dug out of banana

plantations. My flag is the same color as fruit–

the stars made of white thread the same count

as luxury hotel cotton. We don’t keep alarm clocks

anymore. We cover our heads in the morning

to escape terror anthems. We cover our heads

to keep arctic aurora out at night. If those

light-speed specks can’t embed themselves

into my retina, their journey may continue,

only to be eaten away by prisms of water drops

that scatter rainbows into interference patterns

on Thomas Young’s puzzling slits. If you fire a gun,

it chews bullets–bullets that split apples. Apple rain

and rot in the fall is a way for the tree to eat itself.

It’s as close as we’re gonna get to a perpetual motion

machine in this massive gradient that just keeps going

down– this land made of apples, apples made

of so many things: Sugar. Sound.

They taste like water,

like a supernova,

like drowning.

Setting Up Camp to the Song Are You Going To Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz

We set up one dome tent and a janky stove on river gravel

only reachable by John Berryman and his J-3 Piper Cub—

65 horsepower of coughing cylinders and dented floats

that come to rest on a glacial pool of choked salmon waters.

There are five of us on this overnight—one for each tent pole.

We are way too young to be out here alone

in this Chugach Mountain grizzly bear automat,

but our parents counted in Alaska years. One of those is worth

1.5 of those years they have in the lower 48. When you’re 8,

you’re actually 12. When you are 12, you are actually 18.

You can fucking drive at 12. Pull and launch a skiff. Vote

for town council. Shoot a rifle at mammal or fowl.

Exsanguinate the mothers and the fathers from their friends

and flinching babies. Run a blade down the skin of kings.

You are seven and a half (five normal years) when you

learn to work a pepper spray gun and turn back teeth

that will open your gut like a banquet beer bottle. Luckily,

it was the time of the Sony Walkman. We came out of the womb

knowing how to work a headphone splitter. Lenny Kravitz

sang us to sleep that night. We kept rewinding side A

over and over again. We couldn’t hear the scraping rocks.

That would have to wait until morning, when we leave the tent

to piss, see the tracks of a bear that wandered in, how it took

our bacon without asking, the size of its giant feet in the sand.

We were more scared that morning by the erupting sound

of John's low-flying plane as it came to take us away.

Photo of Trapper Markelz

BIO: Trapper Markelz (he/him) writes from Arlington, Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbook Childproof Sky, a Cherry Dress Chapbooks 2023 selection. His work has appeared in the journals Baltimore Review, Passengers Journal, Pine Row Press, Wild Roof Journal, The Dewdrop, and Poetry Online, among others. Learn more at trappermarkelz.com