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Piero Toto
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the poet
Piero Toto (he/lui) is a bilingual poet, Italian translator and translation lecturer based in London. Author of Queering Sexual Health Translation Pedagogy, he co-edited Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom. His poems in English are in Magma, Poetry London, fourteen poems and Queer Life, Queer Love II, as well as in other UK and international publications. In his native Italy, Piero has published the poetry pamphlet tempo 4/4, and is a contributor to literary blogs Atelier and Laboratori Poesia, for which he translates contemporary UK poetry into Italian.
the poems
Emotional Freedom
Technique
My therapist says:
narcissism is a form
of unspent joy
I say:
you think you love yourself
until you don’t
you think you love somebody
until they don’t
spent is their body
a continuum of—what?
as if absence could
summon the shape of stillness
(on the matter of stillness
we rewind the hours)
and who but who
deserves their fate, really?
you already exist
this time exists
the linear cry
of your thinking
forever exists
This was a day of revelations:
bleed with me until
the tenderness of a pause
smoulders from within
How to
Address Absence
the outline of shadows reveals
we’re born in the depth
of zigzags & groans
reflecting the impact we make
the neon messing with our vibe
I turn around
to feel you inside me
a hollow touch
how fickle the dark
incessant in this last room
The Performance
of Pain
give us a scar
or a street corner
we can fight
when secluded
in the chase
for a name that fits
give us more time
to reset the world
perception reduced
to a pixel of you
my hell is an echo
of wanderers
today’s epiphany:
we shimmer
still like blood
on a scar
Publishing credits
Emotional Freedom Technique /
The Performance of Pain: exclusive first
publication by iamb
How to Address Absence: Queerlings (Issue No. 2)
as part of House Trilogy