Steve Klepetar My Mother Has Purple Hair   It explodes from her small head in forks of lightning glowing violet at the tips. She bends from high clouds, clenched center of black knuckles and fist  like some smooth section of rainbow across an empty  patch of sky.  She has become a meteorological event.  The National Weather Service tracks her, she leaves radar prints larger  than El Nino's.  My mother is more spectacular than the Northern Lights.   In her wrinkled hands she bears the Bischoff's Brot she baked me clotted with red, green and yellow bits of dried fruit and tiny cones of chocolate. Weather systems swirl around her kitchen. Whenever she bakes, it rains and drops fall and shatter on the streets like colored glass. Her cake is pale gold, like wheat in sunlight. It smells like the passing of a storm. My mother's eyes are green and her hair, purple.  Her friends have blue hair or hair the color of carrot scrapings, or scarlet hair. The grow in my mind's garden, strange dahlia's blossoming on dry stalks.

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