The Tattooed Poets Project: Darren Demaree's Heart in Ohio

Darren C. Demaree is our second TPP alumnus returning this year to the site. His Nabokov tattoo last year was a crowd-pleaser, for sure.

His kids made a cameo last year, and so, here they are again:

You can see, on Darren's upper left arm, some Ohio-shaped ink:

It reads "How glad I am to be so simple / as to write love poems for a state / shaped like a swollen heart."

Darren explains:

"The Ohio tattoo is my most recent addition and contains the end of a poem of mine, 'Ohio #5'. The work was done by Dino Nemec at I Heart Tattoo in Clintonville, Ohio, just down the street from I live. I'd wanted to get an Ohio tattoo for a long time, and when the 'Ohios' sequence I wrote made it into my first collection it seemed appropriate for me to have the state frame my favorite lines from the sequence."

The poem from which these lines were taken appears below, in its entirety. It originally appeared on Juked, as well as As We Refer to Our Bodies, Darren's first collection which was published last year by 8th House Publishing.

Ohio #5

The sun is up. The sun is gone.
The red barn is still there,

chasing what moves towards it.
Too much of the what is spent

on the silhouette of its coming.
A religion for any moment, I believe

in nothing, I believe in Ohio.
How glad I am to be so simple

as to write love poems for a state
shaped like a swollen heart.

~ ~ ~

Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the author of As We Refer To Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag),and Not For Art Nor Prayer (2015, 8th house). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. You can follow his writings through his website, www.darrencdemaree.com, or on twitter @d_c_demaree.

Thanks to Darren for his latest contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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