Tag: Darren C. Demaree

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julie Maclean’s “Kiss of the Viking”

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Real Good for Free on a Stockholm Subway
Remembering Joni in Paris

The gypsy with the cheese-fat grin,
crushed takeaway cup hidden

in his pocket, struck up
a jig with a BYO* violin.

We smiled eco-friendly smiles
the Nordic way, not too much,

felt relieved at the next stop
when we could escape,

hadn’t time to scrabble
in wallets to spare him a coin,

though we clapped in what
must have been appreciation.

So, when I heard a clarinet
in a jazzy riff

(Dad playing Summertime
in the Llandoger Trow),

I saw the man with the pirate patch
squatting in rags on a city path,

and when I put ten kroner in his plastic bag,
he winked with his one good eye.

*BYO: Australian custom. Bring your own as in alcohol or drinks.

—

This selection comes from Julie Maclean’s Kiss of the Viking, available from Poetry Salzburg. Purchase your copy here!

Originally from Bristol, UK, Julie Maclean is now based in Australia. She is the author of ‘Kiss of the Viking’ (Poetry Salzburg, 2014), ‘When I saw Jimi’ (Indigo Dreams Publishing, UK, 2013) and e-chapbook ‘You Love You Leave’ (Kind of a Hurricane Press, US, 2014). Her poetry and short fiction features in international journals like Poetry and The Best Australian Poetry (UQP). Blogging at www.juliemacleanwriter.com.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julie Maclean’s “Kiss of the Viking”

photo head and shoulders stripe

Made in Sweden

Carpets of canola remind me
        of homeland,
You Yangs, clots of granite,
        ibis nesting in a mess
of twig and plastic bag.

Skåne farms
        are clones of clean
Monopoly hotels,
        no weeds,
turbines in handy places
        blow cobwebs away,

While the elk and bear
        on the graphic back
of a Winnebago
        down a fir-lined highway
                make me smile.

—

This selection comes from Julie Maclean’s Kiss of the Viking, available from Poetry Salzburg. Purchase your copy here!

Originally from Bristol, UK, Julie Maclean is now based in Australia. She is the author of ‘Kiss of the Viking’ (Poetry Salzburg, 2014), ‘When I saw Jimi’ (Indigo Dreams Publishing, UK, 2013) and e-chapbook ‘You Love You Leave’ (Kind of a Hurricane Press, US, 2014). Her poetry and short fiction features in international journals like Poetry and The Best Australian Poetry (UQP). Blogging at www.juliemacleanwriter.com.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson #24 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

all this world’s an open

grave

as love is

open for fallage in by

my unchosen one:

I am God’s promise,

but what of your promise of love?

We toil against gravity all day.

I do not want to wait
to fall
in line

I claw out of the gravity
of your promise

and engrave my own
in earth:     do not surrender

to gravity:

though you lie open

as a grave

sooner or later
that excuse

just stops
working

promises Xander
descended from the Greek
to defend men

who have not fallen in

place: alias: love

is my gravity

keeps me gravely moving graveward
to the hellmouthy gravity of my unreality

(and by grave I mean you)

(and by unreality I mean :

I am the open one
waiting for someone
unwilling to fall.)

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson # 2014 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This message is not for me:

“Just thinking of you and hope
things will go smoother
for you and love
you.”

A slayer with family and friends wasn’t in the brochure:

“sorry, off by one digit,
please delete me”

Without a slayer, you are just pretty much watching

And without a spinster and Halloween cats,
the matchmakers are pretty much on

a rant, no room for logic:

on New Year’s Eve
someone’s mother called me

by mistake

I remembered my mother
is dead

when there was no one to make me tea
or bury me in the crypt of his body

“You can’t keep trying to make everything work
               with one big gesture

or by publishing a book of poems to distract from this: “

“Thanks,

but who is this?

Tragedy?

I am no longer in love
                                  with you.”                                      You no longer turn me on

this old mattress —

all I need:
an unbudger of support                                       I’m five by five

and know the soul is not

all about moonbeams and penny whistles: it’s about self-
                                                                                                                        loathing.

But someone I don’t know loves me.                                 I have a text that says so.

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson #42 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

How can water break?
Ask the cracks and potholes in the boneyard.

In the tub my body sinks to the bottom,
filled with water weight.

No matter how many tears are shed
or how much of myself I pour on you,
the memory of your saliva takes up more
than 78% of me.

Stop this Pitypalooza
At least he has a reflection

like the willows, which weep raindrops
that cannot fall, like my body of water

suspended in this body of water where I find
no reflection, just the hot baptism of my skin.

They’ll never know how hard it is to be the one
who isn’t chosen.

In another time and place, I could be a waterfall
to which, through the mist of clouds broken
by the sun, people pilgrimage to cleanse
their unstakeable selves, the self that cannot remain

in one form

like coffee beans, they hope the rush of my water
will brew them out of their shells, transform them into the essence

of something

drinkable, visible, lovable.

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson #319 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

If girls unnoticed
can become invisible
assassins

and cheerleaders can take down
the competition with flames

if an angel of death can fall
             in love

and if dreams aren’t prophesies

then I will believe
a werewolf you are not

                                           (Do you know why you’re alive?)

though you only once in a supermoon
make love and sleep-talk to me.

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson #7 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The body is an honest animal.
But whose should I believe,

                                yours or mine?

                                                            Want a taste?

The pleasure of eating becomes a sin
when someone fears

                               they’re just sinners,
                               or you are sin:

what marinade of tears and love and joy
          did your thighs and heart, liver and wings
                               wade through
                                        to get to me?

                   What pool has steeped the body of you
                               so that the body of me
                                            craves you inside?

Why can I not want the simple completeness
          of beans and rice or the clarity
                          of chicken soup, the fullness

of sag paneer at Bollywood
         or the comfort of paprikas
                         from my mother’s pot?

And how does evil taste?                             A little bit chalky.

Why can we not be as easy as licks
        of pistachio ice cream churned
                         from rosewater and milk?

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s “Unexplained Fevers”

JHGKitsuneHeadshot

Rapunzel Considers The Desert

Like learning a foreign language,
I want to learn
a new sand – hardscrabble and brown.
I want a new heat in my blood.
blinded and shorn,
I desire new fruit
grown under an unforgiving sun.
Prickly pear,
open yourself to me. Agave nectar.
Quail, jackrabbit,
grackle and green hummingbird,
let your shadows fall.
Let a fierce light try to turn me to dust.

—

This selection comes from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Unexplained Fevers, available from New Binary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) which was an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist in 2012. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches part-time at the MFA program at National University. Her personal website is www.webbish6.com.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s “Unexplained Fevers”

JHGKitsuneHeadshot

Sleeping Beauty Loves The Needle

No thread in your needle, just the spindling
damselflies dart through cracks in the ceiling.
The bird at the window tells you to drop the gun,
put on your nightgown and drown. This bird holds
a branch of judgment and tells you you’ll be the one
standing with a sword when the stars rain down.
She pressed her face to the pillow. She fell
for the hired gun. She ended up hungry, an angel.
Her two white feet cold as her heart, while
her pages all ran clean. No more time for kindling,
sweetheart, better make that fire sing.

—

This selection comes from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Unexplained Fevers, available from New Binary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) which was an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist in 2012. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches part-time at the MFA program at National University. Her personal website is www.webbish6.com.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s “Unexplained Fevers”

Unexplained-Fevers-300x300

I Like The Quiet: Rapunzel 

Solitude my solace, wrapped around me
like layers of golden hair. Stacks of books
and I can sing as loud as I please all day and night.
In sleep I kick and snore, during the day, delight
in eating nothing but radishes and lime leaf tea.
Who says I need a partner to dance? Here
in this tower I am mistress of all; the reindeer,
the knight’s armor teetering in the corner,
various discarded disguises, crowns,
crumbs and bones. Will you rescue me?
What kingdom will replace my bounty
of leisure, what tether of care and nurture
do you wish to rope my neck with?

—

 

This selection comes from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Unexplained Fevers, available from New Binary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) which was an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist in 2012. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches part-time at the MFA program at National University. Her personal website is www.webbish6.com.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.