Poem of the Week | March 16, 2026

Arlene DeMaris was a finalist for poetry in The Missouri Review’s 2025 Editors’ Prize Contest. She is a poet and freelance writer. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, she now lives in Avon, Connecticut, with her husband, Michael, and two cats. Her poetry has appeared in Maine Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Radar Poetry, Connecticut River Review, and other publications, and is forthcoming this spring in Bellevue Literary Review and Bear Review. She is the recipient of the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society, of which she is a member. She is currently at work on her debut full-length collection, Instructions for Use, as well as a chapbook, An Afternoon of Uncertain Pleasures. Arlene holds an MFA in poetry from Bennington College.  

“About the Author” by Arlene DeMaris is our Poem of the Week.

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About the Author

She is the creator of Her Own Life and Things That Happened. 
                           Her work has been translated into nods and winks, 
                           catchphrases and curses and is included  
in every anthology of walks around the block in winter 
                           for fear of going home.  
                           She has appeared in photos with a doll named Sardine,  
standing next to her sister and her sister’s   
                           prettier doll out on the front porch,  
                           crying into the camera. 
She grew up on the second floor. Made a sign of the cross  
                           each time she reached the top of the stairs  
                           and saw the attic door half-open 
with her father’s cigarette smoke emitting.  
                           This inspired her to stay in the front room—  
                           its walls hung with paint-by-number popes 
—and write. She has no children that she can prove.  
                           Sees babies in the produce aisle and whispers 
                           Where were you before this?  
to moon faces rising over the hills 
                           of their mothers’ shoulders.  
                           Her current project, Don’t Forget to Breathe,  
will have a posthumous release with no advance notice 
                           except her own crayon drawing of a tropical beach,  
                           volcano smoking in the background, palms  
bent in a hurricane wind, 
                           shorthand birds and beachgoers scattering to escape. 

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Author’s Note

The “author” in this poem is my sister, Beverly, whom I lost to dementia on Christmas Day 2020. It is nearly impossible to do justice to the quirky, funny, complicated person she was, but this poem is one of my better efforts in that direction.