For My Students Who Wrote Poems Using ChatGPT This Year by Dante Di Stefano

I look out my classroom window
and clock the empty air where a
tree stood for the first decade of
my career.

I once wrote a poem about
squirrels scurrying around its
boughs and trunk, but those
squirrels turned up roadkill in a
Gerald Stern poem I hadn’t yet
read.

Weirdly, last night I was dreaming
a dream where I was trying to
find out the Spanish word for
squirrel and someone told me in
the dream there wasn’t one, so I
believed them and stopped trying
to find it out.

In the movie Conclave, the
stained-glass window explodes
either because of a suicide
bombing or because of the
power of the Holy Spirit.

Each night, I read my three-year-
old son the book, Those Darn
Squirrels!, and he squeals with
delight when they eat salt and
vinegar potato chips and drink
root beer while preparing a gift
for the grumpy old man they’re
always bothering.

After the orchid wilts, it becomes
a stick in a cup of dirt.

It is never enough to feel the
pulse of these ghostings.

Put your fingers to your wrist
and count all the stars you do not
see.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including the book-length poem, The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025). He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018) and lives in Endwell, NY with his wife and two children.

12 January 2026