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      April 21, 2025Arlene DeMarisSeventeen

      The looseness of his age and a dozen beers
      save him. Walk the boy to the road and stand him up
      in my headlights, torn red flag of one hand
      waving me down. What is it the night’s long arms love
      about a drunk? Its dim trees welcome mistakes, its ditches
      cradle wrecks in skunk cabbage, every seventeen
      years another child flown out a windshield, bent
      for good, stopping traffic. I hold his face to mine, read
      the skin of his arm blue with bible verses, my fingers
      pure as well water, and cold. Between his rips
      on the county road and my visits with the dead,
      grief blooms, while overhead in dark branches, giddy
      from their graduation dance, cicadas raise their saw blades,
      those strong yet clumsy fliers colliding
      with whatever crosses their paths.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Arlene DeMaris

      “My poems are postcards from the Bardo, that liminal ether where I find myself turning the corner into later age. They are a way of saying wish you were here to my future self and whatever entity is to come after her. I write for the mysteries that have always confounded me—god, outer and inner space, the human heart, age and decline, the afterlife—and that have only deepened with time.”

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