Negative of a Photo of Fire: poems by Trevor Ketner. Number 11 in Volume Three of our Editor’s Series.
Publication: March 4, 2019 [100 copies]
27 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-50-3
$ 9.00
Cover art by Paul Bilger.
Trevor Ketner‘s poems have been published in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, The Offing, Memorious, BOAAT and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Their chapbook Major Arcana: Minneapolis won the 2017 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss. They were recently named a 2019 Poets House Emerging Fellow.
How We Go On Coveting the Knife
When you told me about swimming at night
I thought of your naked body
covered carefully or not covered in moonwater,
how little I know about your body.
The dark flowers, ripples parting
from white shoulders, parentheses around you
diving down and deeper down
to the dark in dark. It was three AM. I’d slept.
And turning, I still missed you
in the way we miss the disembodied.
I don’t understand how I ought to love you,
so we talked silverware, arched
arrangement, position–as if the body
were only an old spoon. A ladle.
Silver heirloom bestowed
but bloody. To hunt–to cut the stag
open, to wear the color hidden there like rouge.
Seven Kitchens Press 