Marc Tretin’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Bluestem Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Caliban Online, Common Ground Review, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Faultline, The Griffin, Lullwater Review, The Massachusetts Review, Moon City Review, The New York Quarterly, The Painted Bride, Paperstream, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Round, Spoon River Poetry Review, Whistling Shade, Ghost Town Literary Magazine, Qwerty Magazine, and Willow Review, and he was the second runner-up for the Solstice literary magazine poetry prize in 2013. He is the 2015 winner of the Audrey Wasson and Carol Leseure Scholarship in Poetry. His poetry collection, Pink Mattress, was published by New York Quarterly Press in 2016.

No Return Address
By Marc Tretin

My dead dad’s postcard saying, “Wish you were
here,” is my feeling I still have to go
after I go. I have his prostate. A whir
of his feeble rage, stopping, starting, slow.
As I think of him on a liberty ship,
and the gray Atlantic filled with U-boats,
his face is in my mirror. His hot tears drip
from my eyes and make my son remote.
His picture postcard was of a large gray swell
and a hand coming out of the sea. I fear
drowning and all day a salty smell stings me.
Standing at the end of a rocky jetty
I, without my son, skip rocks into the sea.