SELF-PORTRAIT AS A BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY POEM

Dante Di Stefano

A man talks through imaginings of me,

slaughtered bride in antlered regalia.

I have made of my mind a grotto full

of broken marble saint statues and fawns

slain in aster fields of amaryllis.

My mouth overflows with the bleat of sleep

wed to eternity—that drunken god.

I’m always ice fishing on thinnest ice.

I’m always fly fishing in the rapids.

I set on the porch, talk theology

to the goats and the wombats at the edge

of my understanding, and preach twilight

to the violence hidden in the heart

of each plump ripe All-American boy.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2018, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Álvarez, he co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in English literature from Binghamton University and is the poetry editor for the DIALOGIST.