FEATURED WRITER OF THE WEEK: STEVE KLEPETAR

Teasing Out the Strands

Last night she walked in the moonlight until

exhaustion drove her back to bed. Her brother

climbed a mountain in her mind, always bent

upward toward the damp, hanging mist, silent,

inexorable as a shadow with no face. Maybe

his legs burned, but he never spoke, just toiled

up the path of that rocky slope. Somewhere

an ocean roared to an audience of sand and stars.

She drank the wind, made it last and tease her

thirst. She wrote to him, an essay in letter form,

teasing out the strands of their commingled blood,

held a mirror to his stony back, which cracked

and sent the usual shiver through her aching arms.

Each jagged shard she dropped into a black crevasse.

Sky Burned Above Her

and she swam

through milky flame and her tongue burned

hopeful and free, gliding the tree line, eying

crossroads and nests.  Dust and devils of wind

and emptiness stretched across red sand. 

She hugged her name to her chest

that vivid spell on her lips, wide mouth a river

meandering across the meadow of her face –

tree above her a last pale word, a web of shade

and a language of cloth and tongues

a gift found with a blind hand, house with a chimney

and bell, musical shrub  rope braided with golden sparks

tossed into the careless sky, a falling woman tumbling

like rain down into the mirrors of my own drowned bed.

What Do You Mean?

What do you mean when you say that time

does not exist, that light from dead stars

reaches our eyes as harbingers of laughter

and sparkling bubbles of wine? 

Yesterday at the gym, you climbed the wall

slowly, gripping red and purple stones,

humming an old lullaby to quiet your

thrumming nerves. All the pretty little horses

and then you are two, with a yellow blanket

shoved in your mouth. Tomorrow you may

hit a home-run into the tennis courts, startling

the players or you may fall from an oak,

break your wrist. The sea lies speechless on

summer nights, waves have been rolling,

crashing on sand forever, as the sun, bloated 

and wild, consumes your madly spinning earth.

Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014.  Three collections appeared in 2013: Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press).  An e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, came out in 2014 as part of the Barometric Pressures series of e-chapbooks by Kind of a Hurricane Press.