Poetry

roya ann miller photo

By

Darren C. Demaree

TRUMP AS A FIRE WITHOUT LIGHT #115

The word can curdle if you keep it in your mouth all of the time, if you only use the angry corners of it a bit at a time.  These men in their terrible and expensive suits, they’re not chewing on their own tongues, they’re chewing on the word.  They roll it around.  They play with it.  They use it the same way they use motels.  When there is a good enough excuse to fuck the scene they spit it on the floor, and those that adore them see the garden unfold in that bad carpet.  All I see is their fat cheeks.  All I see is a partial blessing of spittle.  All I can think about is that it will be up to my children to clean those floors.  How will they think of us while they demolish most of what it is we’ve built?

TRUMP AS A FIRE WITHOUT LIGHT #116

New flowers never grow in a President’s hand.  They lose them while they tend to each, single afternoon of our nation.  What will he do without a single petal to begin with?  When he swears an oath is there any doubt he will do so with no intention of sacrificing a single atom?  We don’t need these men or women to be gardens, but we need to know that they understand the process of the roots, of the sunlight, of the bloom.

TRUMP AS A FIRE WITHOUT LIGHT #117

Dried and drained, I look the same way a creek bed looks during a drought.  There is no life once the mud is gone.  Winter after a drought does terrible things to a person.  When this is all done I will look like I’ve lived through a Trump presidency.  It will be worth it, but damn I used to look so strong in the first days of Ohio’s fall.  I used to, on certain days, be a little pretty.  That part of me became so useless so quickly.

Darren C. Demaree

My poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Diode, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review.

I am the author of six poetry collections, most recently “Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly” (2016, 8th House Publishing). I am the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry.

I am currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with my wife and children.