Trevor Ketner
Winter 2026 | Poetry
the star (tarot card)
the islands hollow and the horses
are killed in the years-long theater
of recurring forest fires the city
the bereft city consuming and forgetting
simple things ice vodka cranberry lime
forgive what you believe needs explaining
to form the circle pieces of
glass arranged for a ballet cracks
in white tiles looking like hair
our grids of lack recall every
light switch in an old apartment
maybe all we know is grief
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021) a winner of the National Poetry Series. Their chapbooks include self-portrait as chimera in a convex mirror (Gasher Press, 2026), Negative of a Photo of Fire (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (The Atlas Review, 2019), and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the 2017 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. They have been published in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Their prose can be found in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. They have been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Lambda Literary, Poets House, The Poetry Project, and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and live in Manhattan with their husband.