Two Poems by Steve Klepetar

Your hand

that brilliant beam of light, that laser at the end

of your lightning arm.  How those photons stir

my brain.  We red shift our way through space

with only our separate skins to remind us of our

names. I imagine eating your cake, the one you

spread with chocolate ganache, and serve up

to helpless, hungry guests.  My tongue swells

and I imagine drinking your eyes.  I have spent

the morning cooking for you in my paltry way,

green curry chicken thick with cilantro

and coconut milk and the pepper paste you love. 

I boil and reduce. 

I imagine hacking into your Facebook account,

posting your brilliant trivialities:

Today I have two thumbs, tomorrow maybe more. 

I have wandered in the groves of the sea and touched

slippery brows of whales.  When squirrels run across

my roof, I sing to them in tongues of fire

and melting snow. All must ‘like” me and despair.

I’ve tattooed your profile picture on the secret

parts of me; imagined my lips, the honey

of your flesh, the ladder I might have climbed to change

a flickering bulb or whisper my devotion to the sad faced moon.

In town men carry swords

as if this were a kind of

spectacle –

parade of tears through winter ice.

They have come to bury

a heart in the snow, to bear

the burden of eyes.

All night they listened for moths

murmuring in attics secured with chains

gnashed their teeth against bedposts and nails.

Their wives dart and skip blue

and green

as parakeets, their sons carve

demons in tough

flesh of leafless trees. 

When will their daughters

return from sullen hills with noses

bitten by crows?

Here in cold gray sun, they spit blood

and whisper of lips and wings and cryptic birds. 

Steve Klepetar's work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  His chapbook, My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto, was recently published by Flutter Press.