i told my children you might choose to read these poems in the bareness and anxiety of your young adulthood while you search for me in the thousands and thousands of poems i’ve written so that i could explore so that i could explain so that i could hide and lie about some small terribleness and it gives me endless joy that you will find me here right here right now as bare as you are but feeling no anxiety at all because i am with my children in some small way in the future when i love you even more than i already do because that’s how real love works it grows with the epic it encircles the epic until you cannot tell why or how any of this began but you know you know you know that if there is such a thing as a soul it exists to be buoyed by moments like this
Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (8th House Publishing, 2016). His seventh collection, Two Towns Over, was recently selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press and is due out in March 2018. He is the managing editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.