The Museum Is Free on Sundays
Woozy in the blue breeze,
I found the bastard’s conduit
in the sponsorship
& the naming
of the sponsorship
after capitalism’s dead wife.
Look! The tethers have
all been cut
& the rope-makers
have decided to frame
the performance
while they drown us in
oceans of rope. The rupture
must, but I refuse to trade
one day for six. That shit has
only ever given us thresholds
& doors & gods
& slavery. We sail only
because there is wind
& a moon. We create thickness
as a dance to encourage
a proper rubbing. If fire comes
don’t trap it in a building.
Let it burn like a beast
with no plan. I am only
for the art that routes us
through their melting fat.
I am only for the naming
that removes the distance
between the rabbit’s breath
& the rabbit’s flight. Follow
me to the fields. The real
fuckery is done hiding
& it’s free & free & free
& free & free & free & free.
a poem for my friend steve kowalski days before his first child is born
we both know
the taste of the flare
before it’s lit
& what to do
when the next-on
obliges the passed-on
let’s say
we’re persistent
let’s say
we’re willing
to give up
the world
to the hands
we don’t know yet
& that’s
how we get
to run away
towards untouchable
waters tides
that refuse to tide
a large fleshy hand
lit as a candle
& soft as a candle
in all three stages
bare rendered bare
& yet afraid
only of oldness
only of the cathedrals
we left behind
after we knew
hymns can only be
hymns when the singer
knows their throat
is meant to close
tightly around the belief
that the oxygen
is a religion unto itself
that breathing in the dark
is as simple as breathing
in the light
& no one gets to keep
anything at all
so we give a threshold
to a threshold
& we invite
a way of life
that can bury us
as we always dreamed
ungently loved stirred
forever a gully
as a gift
a new place revealed
where before there was
only a man
Emily as the Free Play of Beauty
Call it what you will,
but under the arch of Emily,
I’m in an orchard
slipping on the fruit
we love to throw
at each other. Damn straight
we have no intention
of cleaning any of this up.
Our mess is the whole point.
Darren Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in numerous magazines/journals, including Hotel Amerika, North American Review, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of twenty-one poetry collections, most recently in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff (February 2024, April Gloaming Publishing). He is the Editor in Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He currently lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.