Winter Night by Steve Klepetar

Winter Night by Robert Rhodes

Winter Night: Snow Squall With Trees 

Three men walk in a squall under a line
of trees, brothers, lost in the branches
and snow. Their faces have vanished
in swirling air. They appear as nothing
more than red streaks through a white
smear of sky as it bends low overhead
to lick the ground, rising in mounds
and hillocks and drifts. Night falls,
swallowing voices. Nothing human
remains. Their hoods flutter around
phantom faces, elbows and knees have
disappeared. They float outside themselves,
watching for shadows, for movement
or wings or fur. They are cut and blind,
hear nothing but wind and creaking
trees, footballs crunching through ice.
They have slipped into some new madness,
the embrace of cold.. Their blistered eyes
burn windows on the face of a frozen lake.
 
Steve Klepetar

Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others.  Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (Kind of a Hurricane Press). His new chapbook, The Li Bo Poems, is forthcoming from Flutter Press.