Arlene Demaris writes poem with tenderness and an edge.

I’ve read poems that are filled with tenderness. I’ve read poems that have an edge. But I can’t think of a collection I’ve read that have both tenderness and an edge.

That is, until I read Instructions for Use: Poems by Arlene Demaris. Not only does she write poems that are tender with understanding, she also drops any idea of rose-colored glasses and smacks you with often-shocking reality. And what you realize is that this is life, with the good and the bad mixing together into one lump of what it means to be human. Or as Demaris writes, we forget “how much of us is salt water, how much of us is music.”

The effect is jarring but recognizably real. A woman describes herself, and the possibilities of who she might actually look like, as she likes in an open casket. The oldest living woman tells her secret. An aging couple on a first date, speaking out of loneliness and memory. A family tragedy that leaves a stain on the lace tablecloth.

Demaris writes about herself, family, friends, the elderly, the young.

And then this poem. I’m not sure I was ready for it. I had already seen that Demaris has a gift for unsettling images, one that present themselves sand then burn their way in. But this one almost leaves me without words. The images it evokes are haunting.

House Explosion, What to Know

She left him early.
He was upstairs writing
the note later found blocks away,

I’m lost without you, his pale face
or was it a fold in the curtain
pressed against the fog of an attic window.

From inside, his heart was a mallet
pounding as if the work song
of rowers. I will never, he wrote,

I will always. Beside the cellar door
a click, a flare, and the propane
tank took a grievous turn.

No danger to the public
except that the house was blown
into orbit and the bodies
of termites nesting in the sills fell like rain.

The universe rotates on a grand scale,
she had told him more than once.
How can we find love in the churn?

I left the living room light on, he wrote.
The dishes are clean.

Demaris has published poems in Bellevue Literary Review, The Missouri Review, Connecticut River Review, Maine Review, Radar Poetry, and other literary journals. She was awarded the Nutmeg Poetry Award in 2023 and Connecticut Poetry Award in 2024. She received her MFA degree in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars of Bennington College in Vermont. She lives with her family in Connecticut.

Instructions for Use is an arresting collection. It holds you close and then it squeezes. It is life and death; it is tender and shocking. It leaves you nodding in agreement and recognition and gaping in astonishment. And it is real.

Photo by waferboard, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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