Steve Klepetar- Three Poems

Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared widely. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press, and Family Reunion, forthcoming from Big Table Publishing.

Peacocks

We walked to the river, whispered

to the trees. “Our ritual,” you said

as wind tossed brown water onto our

shoes. Silently, I admired your hair,

the way it shone in the buttery sun.

Holding hands, we followed a path

to the peacock cage to see the strange

white bird and small, brown chicks.

“A genetic mutation,” you said, reading

from your phone, but why these caged

peacocks in the park, no one knows.

One lady spoke to them, over and over

telling them how beautiful they are,

as if it were something they needed

to know. She spoke with that odd little

voice some people use with children,

until rocks broke from the hills,

cascading in a shower of broken shale.

All night in the cold, her mad eyes shone.

Threshold

Somewhere a door has opened

as you wait in this quiet

neighborhood in a town of rivers

and leaves. Slowly, the day has grown

hot, and now in the long afternoon

every road seems entangled in a web

of dreams. You have tumbled 

out of history. Can you feel shockwaves

as the threshold looms? Your feet

tingle; they have fallen asleep.

So painful to stand, but someone

has nailed your boots to the floor,

clarified exactly where you must

attend to your blood as it pulses

through the airways of your flesh,

its tides controlled by a merciless moon.

Debility

“I’ve got to see someone about this sleep,”

my mother says. “When I just sit down,

even for a second, I fall asleep, any time

of day.” But there’s no help for this at ninety-nine;

it’s part of what the doctors call “debility” –

congestive heart failure, kidneys slowly

shutting down. “And when I sleep, I dream

so vividly it becomes hard to tell what’s real.”

She dreams of the dead, her sister gone for

nearly forty years, a couple, two good friends

from her days in Shanghai, her lover dark-

haired and fit, with his demanding voice

and tears. It’s easy to see where they come

from, our noon-day ghosts, inhabiting this last,

small room. They don’t beckon in a tunnel

of light or emerge as terrors from darkness

and mist. It’s pleasant to see them. All the same,

they wait, blurring into the fabric of unraveling days.