Vanishing by Steve Klepetar

Storm surges from the southwest, wind and a mix of snow

and ice and rain. Night of cats, night of glowing eyes, night

of soft footfalls troubling roofs. April’s masquerade, teeth

glinting: ice daggers from snow-piled eaves. All ghosts

have come home, finding their dark ways through mounting

drifts. Who circles our houses, seeking cracks or broken seals

through which to seep, bodiless and cold, eyes smeared

and blackened and all words lost in weather’s fierce, ironic

tongue? Light a fire. Shadows mingle with draft of smoke

and in the distance, throb of railroad cars. This can’t last,

howling through tangled hair of night, where streetlights shake

in the gale, and halos splash hypnotic along empty, vanishing streets.

Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and

Best of the Net. His latest collections are Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe

Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing) and My Son Writes

a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (forthcoming, Flutter Press).