February 2016
Steve Klepetar
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
I'm a retired college professor (Literature and Creative Writing), who was born in Shanghai, China in 1949. My parents were Holocaust survivors and refugees. I grew up in New York City, earned my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and spent my teaching career in the Midwest — Wisconsin for six years, and then Minnesota. My work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize, including three in 2015. I've published a book and seven chapbooks, two of which — Blue Season and 
​Return of the Bride of Frankenstein — can be downloaded for free.  (Just click on the book title.)


​Editor's Note: In his submission letter to me, Steve wrote, "My Facebook friend, the Chicago poet Jenene Ravesloot, posted a photo of some shoes someone left on her front stoop. I wrote “Someone’s Shoes,” and sent it to her. She liked the poem and suggested I try to publish it with the photo, which she kindly sent me." 

​
Someone’s Shoes
For Jenene Ravesloot
​Someone left his shoes on my stoop,
just walked out of them as if he hoped
to wander barefoot into the heart of snow.
I can see him leaning against the door,
struggling a bit to unlace them as his
eyes tear up in the wind. He’s gotten
them off now, and there go the thick,
woolen socks, down some rabbit hole,
with his coat and pants and shirt
and underwear. Naked, he opens some
other door. Maybe he has a key, or
someone equally strange, as unattached
as he to the bright, heavy objects of this
world, has opened it for him, gathered him
into the heat of her embrace, where their 
nakedness explodes as a shower of fiery sparks.

©2016 Steve Klepetar