Ante Meridiem

Ages ago, I asked some students
to write a universe in which it’s always
three a.m. and now
I find I am in that universe 

and how real it is, and I have not
traveled there, it has traveled to me
and I am in the center of it.
How can I explain? 

Some days are cloudy and yet,
for a measureless length, an interminable
wait of time, it does not rain,
and you call your grandmothers and say: 

It can’t decide what it wants
to do. The sun wants to come out,
the clouds want to rain, the rain wants
to stop. But it can’t decide. 

Now you are watching it
not decide, like you once watched
a bowling competition that was
the only thing on television 

at a certain hour on Saturdays
in a house that smelled of wood
and good cooking, the smells of your childhood,
in a city whose pavements are made 

of the metals in your blood and lungs,
in a state where your uncle was governor
before you were born, in a world
you no longer grasp, but remember. 

ξ

Cul-de-sac 

Another quarantine, my early teen
prisoner-of-war years. 
War between me and my parents? 
I’ll say, since this is a place for honesty, 

civil war between me and my body
for years between puberty,
between three oily, smelly hairs
sprouting under the crook of my arm, 

and the day I got a driver’s license.
Friendless years of days of books
and trivial lists and Lego houses
with made-up families in them 

I gave real names. At night, I’d climb
from my window onto the little roof
and look in four directions.
More roof and the house’s siding 

pale as birch. Tall pine trees
fragrant between us and the Reo house.
The backyard and beyond it some woods
and in the distance, but less than a mile, 

a highway with twinkle lights, soft hum
of eighteen-wheelers gliding
south to the landfill or north
to what I considered escape because 

I’d never driven to the end
of Douglas Ave., the first street
I ever lived on, which ends
in a town called Douglas with, 

I now know, a cluster of old white
buildings and a lake. And the fourth
direction, above all that, the sky
a blank canvas, velvet-textured, 

and I learned how night is a blue
color just as the crayon claimed.
I thought about who I would marry
as I felt wind on my skin 

and felt desire to feel other things
between my legs when I got old enough.
To state the obvious, my inner thighs
had never been touched or kissed 

except by that wind. As these years wore on,
I was gifted a tent and would stay
summer nights in the yard
on the edge of the woods 

with a radio to sing to me
until I was sure everyone inside
the house was asleep,
all its many eyes then dark, and I 

stepped naked from the flap of the tent
(zipped tight because I hated
anything that crawled)
and I walked without a flashlight, 

for I did not need one in those woods.
They were city woods
and they were my woods
and a kid named Dusty lived down the hill 

if I walked far enough.
At a certain cluster of stones,
I would sit or lie against their cool
hardness and touch myself 

with eyes open though dreaming in a sense
and afterward pissed down the slope
just to hear the sound
of how alone I was in this body. 

The night belonged to me and extended
to the boundary of my hearing,
of all I could see, the entire world
my yard and the field 

of my senses, and when I returned
to the tent and zipped the flap
with myself inside it, the world, too,
shrank in with me, and I slept. 

ξ

Night Owl 

I understood young that some people
go to bed early and some
stay up late, perhaps preferring to fall
asleep with the gray-blue haze and hush 

of television voices, head nodding back
against couch cushions, mouth gaping wide,
because of my father (the first
kind of person) and my mother 

(the second kind) and my nana
(asleep in a chair in the den
who claimed she needed two,
three hours a night, and cat naps by day, 

which she mostly denied), and her
husband, the one who brought breakfast.
Morning belonged, I guess, to the first kind.
If I thought about it, I could picture 

their calm time, their tables of eggs
that made me gag, their orange juice,
coffee and newspaper, their windows
made of light. In my teen years, my father 

became insomniac, his worries
manifested in winter attempts
to heat the house using only
a wood burning stove he loved 

so much he named it Magnus.
And in summer, he became
obsessed with watermelons, not by day,
his belly full of fresh shellfish 

from the bay, but at night,
he took the biggest knife he had
and lobbed a green gourd in half,
spooned pink flesh into his mouth 

and wrapped the other half for later.
The other half was always gone by
morning, and by now, you have guessed
the nature of this shrewd observer of the house’s 

breathing patterns, myself, I was always
the second kind of person. Midnight
was mine, and I knew that night-
owl-hood was a lonely thing 

and I guessed if I was going to spend
this much time alone, then I’d better
become a writer, which scared me.
Night, even in its beauty, 

is fearsome by nature, is it not?
It is what hides what lurks
within it, it is when we expect
the worst we can imagine 

can happen. We never want
to go it alone, so we stalk the hallways,
checking window locks like ghosts
of ourselves. Even as a child, I knew 

it was possible to die in my sleep,
according to the prayer, before I wake.
For years, I wrote at the top of my page,
beside the date, “after midnight,” a habit 

to note the difference between day
and date, to recognize the marker
in time between days is the dark
in which I write, my friend the many- 

shaded dark behind heavy curtains
in this room where I’m still
the writer I became, and still I am
alone as an I, but now, less absurdly afraid.

ξ

Anthony DiPietro is a gay Rhode Island native who has worked in community-based organizations for 14 years. In 2016, he joined Stony Brook University, where he earned a creative writing MFA, taught college courses, and planned and diversified arts programming. He is now associate director of the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, his poems and essays have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Spillway, Washington Square Review, and others. He has been a finalist with Coal Hill Review, Naugatuck River Review, and The Tishman Review and has received fellowships from Aspen Summer Words, The Frost Place, and Key West Literary Seminars. His website is www.AnthonyWriter.com.