A Black Notebook by Steve Klepetar

In my imagination I was in Berlin,
riding a tram through the pale afternoon,
the buildings whispering history
through cracked paint.
I carried a black notebook filled with names—
not of places, but of moments that refused to die:
my father’s laughter in a language I never learned,
my mother’s silence when she heard rain.
A street musician played something half-forgotten,
and I thought it might have been the national anthem
of a country that never existed,
one where pigeons ruled the boulevards
and clocks melted into puddles near the Reichstag.
I bought coffee from a woman
whose eyes flashed like the ones in my dreams,
and she said, you’ve been here before, haven’t you?
I wanted to tell her about the snow
that fell in August once,
how it covered the tracks between memory and desire,
but my German collapsed into smoke.
That’s when the tram stopped, and everyone filed out
into a sky that smelled faintly of lemons and loss.
I followed them, hoping someone might turn and wave me home.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.