Turning
Turning
Turning
After reading
the poems submitted after the deadline for the January Poetry Challenge was
extended and rereading the earlier submissions, Andrea Witzke Slot selected a winner for the January Poetry
Challenge. She said that the winning poem “tackles a difficult subject while
moving a specific conceit from the poem “Regret” into a new work very much the
poet’s own.”
Here
is the poem she selected:
Turning
“It
is hard to hear when I am turning, turning…”
Andrea Witzke Slot
I
am turning, turning with the year, turning
into
the empty fields crusted with snow,
becoming
the man in the photo with black eyes
and
bewildered smile turning his face to glass.
There
is nothing I understand, not the waves
of
memory washing over me or the silent dogs
lying
on scattered leaves. I am turning back
to
you, shot dead on a rural road in Wisconsin,
ten
miles north of Tony, the day after your dogs
were
poisoned and you went looking for somewhere
to
bury your rage. At your funeral in a town near
Milwaukee,
a hundred bikers turned round
your
coffin, poured beer and bourbon on your grave.
Four
in the afternoon, and already the sun
beginning
to sink behind a line of black trees.
Your
mother was broken, your father refused to cry.
He
turned a fist into his palm again and again, gray
lines
of his brows bent in the scowl that for the next
thirty
years turned his face to stone. I have skimmed
above
the ice of your murder, turning, turning
from
your young features chiseled in frost on my
windowpane,
recalling how I watched your sister fold
her
arms and fly inside herself, turning back to her cocoon.
~
Steve Klepetar
Steve Klepetar retains copyright on this poem.
Bio:
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.
To review the
January Challenge, go to http://wildamorris.blogspot.com/2016_01_01_archive.html.
© Wilda Morris
