Poetic lists used to require the shield
& the form, the list and the catalog, rhetoric
& the chaotic enumeration, the non-normal,
the non-sequitur, the dynamic pivot, love
& now they’re just names of lost families
that include the governments that took them.
I know who my nation has given up on
& I know who they’ve executed, buried
& I can’t make gestures that distract from that.
The beauty is still in the whispers,
but the shouting is just our history being
repeated publicly, while they ban the binding.
-- Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently 'So Much More' (November 2024, Harbor Editions) and is the Editor in Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. His poems have 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 currently lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.