One Sentence Poems

Steve Klepetar Florida When a man walks from shadows and his eye explodes and his stretched-out hands radiate flame, when that happens, when his face tears a hole in the sky, we find these sentences hard to complete because words are not prayers and prayers have never been made of brick or stone and here’s […]

Steve Klepetar Ballast I ride the air balloon of your love, soaring higher and higher as I drop the ballast overboard: my ego, that anvil, that anchor made of lead. Steve Klepetar knows it’s the month before the month of May, and spring comes slowly up this way.  

Steve Klepetar Odysseus   In one motion he strung the bow the suitors could barely bend, and he shot them down in a cold rage, so why, when he sailed for Troy, did he leave such a weapon behind? One sentence poems almost always make Steve Klepetar smile.

Steve Klepetar My Mother Had Five Faces  On feast days, she pulled one out for carrying the celebration food, kept another for snarling in the kitchen, and there was one for anger at the shops, one for panic when the subway stalled between stations, and a distant, misty one to rub away her death dreams […]

Steve Klepetar A Story I’ll tell you a story about a frog and a snake and a tree that grew by the river’s edge, how that tree leapt up into light, its branches wound through the canopy, how the green frog listened, heard the tree’s roots sucking moisture from the earth, and it watched the […]

Steve Klepetar Early Snow Today apples tumble as wind tears them from trees, and they bounce and roll in the dying grass as though you were here again gathering fruit with your calloused hands, your enormous eyes half-closed coming over the hill bringing the early snow, you who crossed the border, who passed into darkness […]

Steve Klepetar New Year At the end of the year, as the brothers part company, one turns, his shadow to the wall, the other smiles and leaps out into the cold, green sea, as many winds and waves conceal his body, which winds through watery miles, and now both feel cut in two, incomplete despite their […]

Steve Klepetar They Named My City a Hundred Times  Once for a woman with golden hair, and once for the spirit hills rising to the west when every street had a hundred names – Pear Street became Lion Street, and then Flood Way, or Disaster Boulevard, and when the smoke cleared, The Avenue of Curses […]