4 Poems by Darren Demaree

by Darren Demaree

Emily as I’ll Never Forget that I Happened to Be Particularly Down the Day I Wrote My Best Emily Poem

The world is punishing

& Emily is hysterically funny

& I don’t know how

to make myself happy

so she does it.

I was terrified

& arch one morning,

comparing her in a poem

to a matador, when she came

downstairs, naked,

with two fists of cotton swabs

singing a Cat Power song

& I never asked

what was happening,

but I recognized the tune

& I started a new poem.

Art can save. Emily can save,

but mostly she just sings

when she’s naked

& I have the pleasure

of being witness to all of it.

Emily as Oh, Yeah?

After death, I’ll live

in the invention of Emily.

God-willing

she will live on as Emily.

All that non-existence

will be mine.

Please, please, remember

that my name is not

the name to remember.

Emily as Her Own Vernacular

The mango

Emily steps on

is a county line

& only she

can scald

the earth

with fruit. All

that acid

burns for her.

All those seeds

she dances on

end up

in my mouth.

This language

is studied

by the lost

looking to never

be found.

4/16/25

When it bleeds,

the incongruous elements

of America

can only be weighed

by the smallest hands

of America

& those hands know

that blood well.

That blood

serves the oblong

oligarchs. That blood

is taken

from Americans

still learning the blood

is being taken

from them. If you want

an everlasting July,

you have to abandon

the rest of the calendar.

I want seasons. That

means I want change.