KC Trommer

cantfindit

KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and the founder of the online poetry project QUEENSBOUND. In 2021, she was Artist in Residence through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, and later served as Poet in Residence for Works on Water. Along with Spencer Reece, Jared Harél, and Philip F. Clark, she curates and runs the Red Door Series, a bi-monthly reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens, where she lives. Source  

Self-lit

You’re humming through the streets,

self-lit. I have to correct strangers

who touch your head without asking,

as if to bless you or to take a blessing from you.

When we leave the city, you become

a boy hunting locusts. Nature stuns you—

you load up your pockets and want to bring it

home with us, but Nature stays with nature, I say,

a refrain learned from another mother.

You cannot be unpuzzled by things,

but you marshal all your sweet bravado for me,

who tries but never beats you in a game of chess.

I witness the rook and Queen

moving inside your thinking, squaring

and hewing to pathways of wins, losses.

Childhood’s end is always menacing,

apparent places of stars mark its outer limits.

It heaves up in you when you lose,

when you rage, when you’re afraid.

Glowering out of a fever dream, your eyes shine

as you confess in the dark I was the monster.

You show me a hornet’s nest on a bed of cotton,

hold it up as an offering. I wonder with you

at what you hold—

            summer rivers that show bracken corners,

            eye agate marbles,

            daggerwings of our days in the city

            built of strangers,

                      in a country built of sky.

When I pull you close,

what will flee trembles in you.

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Education & Learning

Literary Devices:

Imperative

an instruction or a command

List Poem

A list poem features an inventory of people, places, things, or ideas organized in a particular way, usually numbered.