Steve Klepetar Plants "Four Trees" with Egon Schiele

Steve Klepetar's work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014. His most recent collection is an e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, from Kind of a Hurricane Press. Klepetar teaches English literature at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. Read more on his website here.

Mahana No Atua

(Day of the Gods)

by Paul Gauguin, 1894

Mahana No Atua by Paul Gauguin, 1894

On

the day of the god, she

lowers her feet into terrible

waters, bleeds her

wide

stream, red silk over sand

pink as melon flesh, war

as her sun-stained

skin,

head tilted, hair disappearing

in black swoops beyond

her shoulders

and back

to broken rainbow

haunting water's surface,

playing deep

tunnels

of her eyes, mysterious

as dreams of sleeping children

curled up

into themselves,

naked at her naked side.

The Artist Marcella, 1910
by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner    

The Artist Marcella

broods on

a blue chaise longue

in yellow and blue striped dress

ignoring the fat white

cat curled

on her pale knees. And now she's

angles in blue with tea things

clashing

on a silver tray, shaft of cigarette plugged

in scarlet lips. See

Erna with Cigarette, 1915

by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner  

her hands, so strangely

bent, one stroking the other, to soothe

or perhaps

keep time with a drumbeat

that syncopates her mind as she glances

away from

her worried guest. Flocks

of starlings float before her eyes, little

ghosts

of some nostalgia she has flung

into the street where a naked woman

tumbles

across a horse gouging circles with its bright red mane.

Four Trees

After the painting by Egon Schiele, 1917

Four oaks on a mountain plain,

three with

crowns of orange gold

Four Trees by Egon Schiele, 1917

as sun sinks toward a jagged peak.

One is nearly bare,

its few leaves

clinging, rags on emaciated limbs.

Striations of sky appear

through

gaps, thick bands of white, gray,

and brown, with few traces

of

blazing red, a hectic color in this

slowly fading light. No grass,

just

these great, deep rooted things

which grip this hard, high

place,

waiting in windless air for night

to rise just beyond the dying

sun.