like sunlight churning in the veins of trees
or water climbing a network of roots.
Sing like smoke or waves of cold air
on a morning with blue light and no clouds.
Sing like a shower of ash, a chorus of dogs
hurtling against their chains. Sing like a lost
chanteuse with arms covered in silk, her
dusky voice haunting the radio. Sing in me
like a whale pod crying in an ocean of ice,
a violin glistening in the dexterous hands
of a woman with coal-black hair.
Sing the way lightning sings a rip in the sky
in summer storms. Sing like a thousand golden
birds, like pale moths in the gathering dusk,
sing like drowning men flailing beyond waves
in the violent grip of a silent and terrible sea.

/

Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014.  Three collections appeared in 2013:  Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), Blue Season(with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press).  An e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, came out in 2014 as part of the Barometric Pressures series of e-chapbooks by Kind of a Hurricane Press.