Poetry by Steve Klepetar

The Lucky Ones

The ones with shadows growing 
from their heels unbruised,
they are the lucky ones, who have 
eaten today. They have eaten and felt 
their bodies move across sand.
True, frogs joined them 
in the showers, but they are the ones 
who still have their feet, 
who have not yet changed their eyes for glass. 

All night water grew around them 
and rested by their toes. 
Sometimes it rippled, thick as oil. 
It was black, and seemed to suck in 
every beam of light. 
Senseless, they gathered stones 
by the water’s edge and built 
little pyramids and cairns. They built 
idols and alters, and in firelight 
they made new songs. They buried 
their dead and carved their names into rock.

Something rustled in the trees, 
and they felt fear, like a green 
snake moving through their bowels.
An owl flew past their camp, 
and they were startled by its bulk, 
the hoods of its strange, yellow eyes. 
In its talons it carried a mouse, 
that writhed like a little ball of death. 
The bird had flown from somewhere 
far away, a mountain or a sea of glass. 
How long would it be until sky 
turned over, and they were left clinging 
to the underside of a world caught in sunset’s violet storm.




Drums

I am trying to untangle the words of the drum.
Drums are tongues of the blood.
They pound through walls of our flesh.
They lie beneath patterns of our speech 
and the many ways we walk. 
Drums heave us up hills and down into the sea. 
They whisper our bodies into cloud and rain.
Drums have a thousand ways to speak of arms 
and legs and lungs. They teach many things
about fingers and palms.
When oceans rise and beaches disappear, 
when mountains glow in dirty red waves, 
drums will build a wall of sound, 
a monument of moving air to honor the echoing dark.




Werewolf and the Moon

Showerhead of light 
in blue-black pool 
of sky, his tail balloon,  

the round boat 
in which he sails 
across tides of toothy lust. 

How he paddles with hairy 
hands, how deep the green 
ocean beneath dreaming eyes.  

Lustrous pearl on a long 
and beautiful neck, 
shining mirror for his true face.  

One day soon his tongue 
will reach that sweet wafer, 
lick its sugary surface bare.




Messengers of God

some of the friends will never be aware of a single tree 
they will live in a world without a leaf 
where the rain is misfortune

    W. S. Merwin


I don’t believe that birds 
are the messengers of God, 
though their songs, 

their screeches and caws 
and coos have meaning, 
even in a world of glass and cars. 

All night their silence 
is an absence that weighs 
on my ears, a leaden nothing 

broken by wind. Sometimes 
a siren shrieks down my street, 
or a train rumbles by carrying oil 

or wheat or parts for machines. 
I might be sleepless then, counting 
my money, twisting the ends of my dreams.
​

Bio: Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work has been published widely in the U.S. and abroad, and has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including four in 2016). He is the author of twelve poetry collections, the most recent of which are A Landscape in Hell; Family Reunion; and How Fascism Comes to America.

---