STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
ANTHONY DIPETRO
I’ll kill love
I’ll do it
every good love story
has a murder inside it
james baldwin probably knew that
does murder equal love?
too dark an artifact
to excavate by daylight
(baldwin on evenings: bitter
stiffening egg whites)
is the true secret this
that by killing a thing
or a person
you become them
like eating?
if this is true
what is this hunger?
(overflowing the river
the cobblestoned docks
the bridges) holy god
if this is true
where can I escape to?
(on paris: hostile city
sour mouths
faces burning in wind)
knowledge
don’t you dare come closer
I’ll be embarrassed to read
this later but (on comfort:
a little bent
a little breathless)
I’ll still turn and turn this obsession
like a knife shucking oysters
like daggers
I throw and catch
fragments of madness (I did not really
get angry: he made me
want to laugh
his black hair gathering the yellow
glow of wine
sometimes we drank cognac)
a man’s on his way here
I’ll spend time inside him
because he’ll smell my body (on men:
they can seem bottomless
shallow and dirty
men are like water,
tempting
treacherous
thieves)
yet the man will remain
unknown to me
like medicine or music or epiphanies that burst
like everyday sunshine
but faster
I’ll never express
what I feel (baldwin on french
language: the underside of winter
aftermath of smoke
the sum of me sighed yes)
never get down from my mind
what I see (the streets a cinema
his beauty
his bravado)
(we took packages of bricks
out of his heart at night)
and when the man’s upon my doorstep
I will say (do you pray?)
stand back
I don’t know
where my next meal
may come from.
Anthony DiPietro is a gay writer and Rhode Island native who spent his career in community-based organizations and now serves as associate director of the Rose Art Museum near Boston. While earning his MFA at Stony Brook, he also taught undergraduate courses, planned readings and campus events, and helped diversify programming. While a graduate student, he was named a finalist with four literary journals and awarded fellowships to attend three writing seminars and three residencies. His poems and essays appear in Notre Dame Review, Spillway, Washington Square Review, and others and can be found on his website, AnthonyWriter.com.
