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1.5

By 

Robert Klein Engler

It’s summer on Bell Avenue across from Strand’s Coal Yard.

We sit on the stairs and wait for the streetlight down the block

to snap on. We see the moths make their bacchus dance

around the glow, and we see more stars than ever because

the night is clear over us. My sister wants to believe one

of the stars above the water tower is our father, who died

on the couch in the stuffy front room last May. He is looking

down on us. I wonder if he sees me and Billy, who lives

three houses down, sit and talk and talk, while I lean back

against the wrought iron banister that leaves a crease on my

skin, until my brother’s bedroom light goes off and Billy

and I are alone, except for a car that goes down 63rd Street,

and then Billy returns his warm hand up my leg and asks

if I will go back to the gangway, where it is darker still.

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Issue 21

published 

September 22, 2017

Robert Klein Engler lives in happy exile in Omaha, Nebraska and sometimes New Orleans. Michael Morgan, writing in the Comstock Review, says that Robert Klein Engler "...is a poet of the first rank,” whereas Andrew Huff writes in Gaper's Block that Engler's writings is, “a sublime banquet of bullshit."

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Issue 21

This writing was originally published in Opium Magazine, and is not listed in the Lit.cat archives.
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