April 2018
Steve Klepetar
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
Full disclosure: I don’t much like poems about poetry. From early on, I felt fake trying to write about writing. So I suppose I should thank Firestone for forcing me to try to write something authentic on that theme. Thanks Fire. Thanks a lot.
 
Submission Guidelines


Chain your poems to an iron chair
and beat them with a rubber hose
until they confess, then send them
our way. We’ll salve their wounds
and give them some useful work to do.
Send up to five poems (or as many
as fit on the back of a hummingbird’s
wing). Be sure to include a brief bio –
fifty words will do – telling us about
the state of your soul, or if you don’t
have one, provide a list of your piercings
and tattoos. A photo would be nice,
your face in the throes of passion
or an action shot (we like backflips,
cartwheels, pole vaulting – anything
athletic will work, but no team sports,
please – we’re individualists). We like
edgy, poems that foam at the mouth, work
unafraid to dig its way to China, verse
that brings down empires but tastes like cherry pie.
 
(First published in Snakeskin, March 2014)

 
 
Hiding the Poem
 

I have put away my words,
closed them in the cabinet
of my own deep chest.
 
Even now, they struggle
to get loose – nouns pounding
with their hammer weight
 
and stone weight
and clanging bells of steel.
I have fallen in love with the tongues
 
of dark, meadows drenched in black waves,
frost patterned on matted grass. 
Verbs dart, hot pricking needles at the inside of my flesh.
 

 


this poem has no title


nothing to drag
from incandescent walls,
not the vast lake, silence
 
and sails merging
with smears of horizon
or cloud where everything
 
returns in glassy fragments
and easy grass burns
on the sweet verge where water
 
laps licking
at dark and open minds
of cats
 
here in such blue freedom
starlings build their prickly
nests, spiders twist glistening
 
wet stars of their taut frets
and joists, and moon throbs,
a circular wound on pale flesh of sky
​© 2018 Steve Klepetar
Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF