poetry by tony trigilio

Dear Stakeholders:

Describe a time you expected or wanted 
to feel a religious or spiritual moment 
but couldn’t. Write what you appreciate 
about a time you felt disrespected by anyone. 

Sometimes, to be honest, I can’t think of 
what to ask. If I agree that objects can exist 
whether or not we see them—the wobble 
of faraway stars, a housefly’s fuzzy clawfoot—

does this mean I’m a team player or a buzzkill? 
Kink your physique in no more than twelve
PowerPoint slides. Teach me your crypto 
fortune in 250-500 words. Tell me about a time 

you were terrified to do something but spur-of-
the-moment you went ahead and did it anyway.

516 South Lincoln Street

I’m here again, the three-bedroom I shared
in Kent, Ohio, with two architecture students.
For some reason, I keep coming back 
in my dreams. If a house is a substitute 
for the body, as my first therapist told me, 
then what’s my unfinished physical business?
Liz and I live here in the dream. David’s staying 
overnight on his way back to California. 
The house is plagued by killer bees 
we’ve grown accustomed to, somehow, 
like the oversized walnut and glass 
coffee table I constantly bump into
on my way to the kitchen. I doubt 
it’s the reason I return so often in dreams, 
but that kitchen was, in 1987, a site of 
near-catastrophe. I left a pot of soupy
fettuccini alfredo burning on the stove 
while my roommate, also named Tony, 
and I drove an hour to Cleveland to see 
Pink Floyd at old, shabby Municipal Stadium.
Lucky we forgot our tickets and had to trek
back to the house for them, whereupon we
discovered the still-simmering fettuccini.

Tonight, Liz and I have a guest and the bees
are keeping him awake. We must do something,
we can’t ask David to put up with killer bees
the same way you’d adapt to annoying furniture.
The three of us, furtive, inspect the first floor
like cartoonish safari hunters, one slow step 
at a time, lest we crack a twig with our feet, 
scare off our prey. David sees it first, a nest 
the shape of a small udder, tough as canvas,
billowing with bees above the doorway 
leading from living room to dining room,
where, it turns out, the floor planks are 
swarming with sugar ants. He looks up and 
notices it’s not a bee nest. Murder Hornets, 
he says—the two-inch long monsters that, 
in 2021, descended upon us from Japan. 
With shark-fin mandibles, they decapitate 
bees, take the thoraxes back to their nests 
to feed their young. Now I’m really scared.
Nowhere is safe from Murder Hornets,
not even the scrappy little Midwest 
college rental I revisit so often in dreams.
A cold tingle rises in my stomach, a fury,
knowing my roommate Jeff, who lives
with Liz and me in the dream, probably
left the unscreened dining room window
open, as he did all the time in waking life,
and this allowed the hornets to invade.

I was tired of his stories back then, 
rural Ohio yarns from childhood whose 
epiphanies always seemed to be some
variation of: The corn’s gotta be knee high
by the Fourth of July. Sick of him stomping
around the house in his bathrobe, 
the country boy who grew up where 
you can’t be heard for miles and miles. 
I remember one afternoon, napping
on the living room couch, my last summer 
on South Lincoln before moving to Boston,
dreaming a squirrel bounded through 
the window left open again. I woke,
afraid it was hiding somewhere inside 
the house, probably rabid, and right then
scrawled in black marker on a blank 
piece of typing paper: Keep window shut—
No screen—Don’t let the fucking wilderness in.