By Rose DeMaris
A suddenness of someone wild clarifies the long opacity
when I go out to latch the gate, feel a disturbance of
grass, hear one flute’s silver whistling in the roots of
our staggered breaths. I don’t know who it is until, in a
beam of the same blue supermoon under which I prayed
last night to be restitched into infinity, I can see,
glowing like a votive candle of the sort I’ve paid a dollar
to light in carved and gilded naves, the raised white
tail of a deer.
I adore the heart inside this world! Are my tears hers?
Between us, just a blue-sewn seam? A tireless artist of
longing, she is the secret sap of life, hidden sequin in the
fissures of ruin who persists in birthing. Love what I have
made. Why are we not kneeling, kissing hoofprints holding
rippling mirrored moons, worshipping, weeping at the
wonder? In the thicket where I wander: a statue, chipped
and white. Red rosaries of bitter-berries hover all
around her.
Rose DeMaris’s poetry appears in Image, New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry in 2022 and the 2024 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and she was a Best New Poets nominee in 2023. She holds advanced degrees in English and Native American Studies as well as an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. She lives, writes, and wanders in Montana.
