Just Once by Steve Klepetar

It happened once, just once
after all the times her mother
came at her with the broom,
face twisted, shrieking about
her smart mouth, screaming
Because I said so,
swatting at the girl with
the handle, raising welts.
Just once.
Her mother advanced
like a storm system,
an avalanche of rage:
I said now!
The girl blocked the blow
with her forearm,
ignoring the black and blue
pain of it, swinging
her open hand with a hard slap
to her mother’s astonished face,
who stepped back, then swung
her own slap at the girl,
who slapped her mother again,
hard as she could,
spinning her halfway around.
It happened just that once,
and never again
the broom or slap,
only the phantom pain
on her arm and the silence
that lived beneath that house,
so polite now with explanations and requests.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Klepetar is the author of fourteen poetry collections, the most recent of which are A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press) and Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps).