Anthony DiPietro

city boy hears crickets as advancing army sirens

I came to the mountain & listened. my mission, to find out what silence sounds like. I found it is not what you think. first you remove the whistling kettle to a cool burner. second ask the wind where it’s come from in such a hurry. third you must wait for the rain to end. while it is singing you hear a whole bluegrass band, the picking of guitar strings, mandolins wailing behind moaning fiddles, almost like women in labor. you will swear you hear voices, a choir, but faintly. it may be the crickets, whose sound is like, when glass breaks, that shattering sound that’s a series of tinier sounds. crickets are missing their collective noun, like cloud, the word for a group of grasshoppers. I will nominate one. a cotillion of crickets, after the rain stops, gossiping down by the creek. do you know, some birds stay awake all night? just like I do. door open. impossible to see apart tree bark black from black mountain rising into black sky. but now I know some things. silence is never still, it is motion, like when a mouth moves in a dream without a soundtrack. even when you subtract all the actions that spook & surprise & enliven you you are left with what comes from within you. your pillow shushing the blood in one ear at time like half a womb or if you prefer a faraway bomb. 

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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.