One Sentence Poems

Steve Klepetar On My Wrist I wrote your name on my wrist with my bad handwriting, and somehow the letters formed a pattern of leaves, or vines, that grew and stretched down my arm, tickling my flesh as tendrils spread, and purple grapes burst out of every stem because you have always been wine, swirling […]

Steve Klepetar Sacred The rabbi of joy and wakefulness follows his students toward the library where shadows of books slide along shelves in fluorescent light and nobody speaks because the air is sacred with words, scented with the perfume of ancient poems. Steve Klepetar wishes that he could see Proteus rising from the sea and […]

Steve Klepetar W. S. Merwin I knew a man who transcribed the wind who etched its song onto rock ledge and cliff as he sat quietly by a window in the sun his lightning eyes burning the world to ash. Steve Klepetar has a heart too soon made glad, too easily impressed.  

Steve Klepetar Will You? If the wave gathering strength over the western sea churns, builds, rises above coastal cities like a giant hand, if it roars us into deafness or shines like a blinding wall, will you stand with me on the cliff’s bare face to watch the old world drown? Steve Klepetar has a […]

Steve Klepetar What I Brought The face of a lizard burned into my skull a deck of cards with fifty-two queens a bucket of sand turning red in the moonlight which you can hang from a maple branch beneath a squad of squabbling crows. Steve Klepetar wishes he could behold nothing that is not there […]

Steve Klepetar Knowing the Way He uses words to make something he could grip with hands, a rope or chain, something he could haul, like planks or boards or bricks, not water, not wind, not a song caught in his ear since last week but a body made of air, limping through crowds as if […]

Steve Klepetar Boy Scouts of America I saw a Boy Scout yesterday in our dying mall where he built a fire, spun straw into gold, sang “Waltzing Matilda” as he drifted out the exit doors, his hatchet face honed by wind. Steve Klepetar wishes he could behold nothing that is not there and the nothing […]

Steve Klepetar Broken Lamp Last night we broke the lamp but when I woke you were still asleep your lovely face in shadow, so I watched a while, marveling at your quiet breaths, the streaming of your hair. There is no video of Steve Klepetar dancing in college.