For Dotty Demaree I got closer to knowing the bearer of minor truths & then another death. There’s no way around this. She said too much & then I said very little for many years. I was so angry that she could sing so well & chose to hold the needle & cover the eye. I was visited by a cardinal I didn’t want to see so I turned away & looked at the grave. Difficult & dead is what guilt? If I stayed a child I would have loved her so simply. How much family is family & did that ever matter? It did. It does. The cardinal sings, even here, even now.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of So Much More (Harbor Editions, 2024), and twenty-three poetry collections. His poems have also appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Hotel Amerika, Diode, North American Review, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the Editor in Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry, currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.