Two Poems by Steve Klepetar

In the Gathering Dark

When you held my breath in trembling hands I knew
we were good for something, for eggplants and ovens

in the fall.  I know your hair, how it streams like rain along
slender shoulders, splashes down your mahogany back.

The taste of you, your melon skin, your marmalade neck,
your shadow flickering on the pale blue wall.  I sit above

these last green leaves, confront a drifting sun, that elusive
shape of vanishing light.  Who says these bleeding days

must end and all our rest rise up and wince in pain?  I know
your eyes, those glowing coals in sudden moonlight, your ribs

tinkling like keys and the wistful shape of your mouth and tongue,
as good as a river of song, a swelling name in the gathering dark.



When Last We Met

You in your formal
clothes and me, cotton-mouthed
dangling from a creaky limb --
             salamanders and oak, spells
             whispered through trees

Where have your henchmen gone,
those heavy breathing clones?

It's raining and raining now, here
in the city of lies --
             wet flags and in the green rectangle
             of park, wet leaves falling all day

Nothing you say now will keep
the midnight away --
             your face a hole in the sky, your lips
             a bright track of flame

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 echapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, came out in 2014 as part of the Barometric Pressures series of echapbooks by Kind of a Hurricane Press.