 Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. Bitter Angel "...when all the angels lost their lives except for one, and he was left wounded, unable to fly…" Raphael Alberti (translated by Mark Strand) Bitter angel with your knife- hilt hand, cigarette dangling as you lean wounded in the doorway of ash and blades, this is an invocation, an opening of my body, a prayer. Here in darkness you have seen clouds become smoke black choking sky. Smoke rises from ovens, escapes from graves and billows from scalded sea. Your eyes can do nothing but burn. They have watched the dead century accumulate skulls, witnessed piles of broken fingers, golden rings and teeth and hair. Your torn wings ache in their absence, your legs broken and heavy in gravity’s unaccustomed pull, dragged down into a suffering shell of flesh and bone, unable to fly. Sleeping Dogs Wind has picked up and white clouds part for the sun. You might have been a dog once, on a day like this, sleeping on a splash of light that puddled round the trunk of a slender oak as warmth penetrated your quiet dream. It was in the backyard of a house almost hidden by a canopy of leaves, a space for dreaming in the sun. All day lilacs rustled overhead offering purple bunches as if their bounty would never fade, a blizzard of petals tumbling to the grass. The House We Forgot Tonight the bricks glow as moonlight trickles through oak. But we just tossed keys onto the muddy lawn as our truck bounced out of town. We were baying to oldies, not caring that our credit was shot. We were looking for Atlanta with a phone and a map. Your mother said this wasn’t a good idea, to drive south in such a wind, face to face with ourselves and the house forgotten, the world not quite green in early spring, but poised to end in gloom or flame or some quieter misery crouched in the future, in shadows where pines bent along the coast and crows above wheat fields pitted the face of sky. Beyond the Tracks A house sits half sunk in weeds, an ocean of grasses nobody wants, a Sargasso Sea of dandelions and crab. Maybe you lived there once, with a unit of your beloved dead. Maybe you sat at the window while crows dotted the empty sky. Faces swam in oil slick puddles, handprints smudged the walls. Voices poured from the kitchen worrying over coffee and soup and handfuls of beans. Radios crackled from an upper floor. Stairs creaked with the weight of ghosts. Windows rattled, trains rumbled by at intervals measured by the absence of noise. They carried freight to a city that burned with desire, one melted down to shells and sand. Tide rushed in and tunnels flooded, subways floated in garbage and rats. It was a town deleted by history, where the dead trudged, following storm clouds and the rains of night. Will You? I will ride a train that stops here, at this beige house with its windows smiling, its pleasant pines bowing, its squirrels chittering over the roof, and its prophetic crows. Without a look back, I will board at 5 a. m., breakfast dancing in my gut, and ride across the desert to mountains bleeding rust red in the sun. Will you travel with me, hands empty as a new page in a writing book? Will you leave the air shaped around a structure charred into shadow and ash? We could carry houses on our backs, small ones into which we could crawl at the first sign of trouble, first hint of gunplay as we bounce into the hungry west, balanced on this river of steel and noise.
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