Drill

by Steve Klepetar

Another day and we’re huddled
behind glass, waiting for silence
to return. A girl shivers in this icy
sound, exposed beneath long
wisps of hair. A gray man fiddles
with his watch. Time stretches,
a tension that penetrates bone.
Sirens and time and glass.
A tall, thin boy pulls and pulls
at his ear. Unaccustomed
to these smells, we look away,
preferring our own pain to these
other faces, distorted mirrors
of green fear. Sirens sing and
we cringe and inch closer to each
other as if a certain noise could
burn skin and melt each unshielded eye.
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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.