Issue #31.2 A Triple Issue: Francesca Leader, Georgi Bargamian, Darren C. Demaree
A Poem by Francesca Leader
I Am Duck Phillips in Mad Men Season 3, Episode 12
Peggy’s at the door of Duck’s hotel room when they announce that JFK’s been shot, & Duck unplugs the TV, pulls Peggy inside & kisses her, & they have their nooner before either of them must face what’s happened, because I think Duck knows that the world has always been burning— that it was sabretooth tigers and gum-rot before it was plague and famine and war. I think Duck, like me, is long past stopping for any flame not fed on bliss.
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Francesca Leader’s poetry and CNF have been published in One Art, Pithead Chapel, Abyss & Apex, Broadkill Review.
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A Poem by Georgi Bargamian
Bruised fruit is sweetest
We laughed when you
announced that you’d eaten the
abandoned bruised pear:
one more food rescue
by a Depression-era kid. But now
I see your kinship with
broken enzymes and the
last fruits to be picked, the
tenderness in your rescue, the
ghost of you slicing
wounded flesh knowing
bruised fruit is sweetest when
eaten uninhibited and alone.
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Georgi Bargamian was a 2025 International Armenian Literary Alliance mentorship program mentee. Her poetry has been published in The Armenian Weekly, The Cincinnati Review, PoetTreeTownA2, The Songs of Summer poetry anthology (Waters Edge Press, 2025) and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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A Poem by Darren C. Demaree
Emily as She is Beautiful and She Laughs
We all spend teeth in the self-wolf economy. She kneels to smile
& I start a revolution. She sings to saint us. Nobody will ever know
she saved a world. Everyone will know why I try so hard to do the same.
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Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-four poetry collections, most recently “Now Flourish Northern Cardinal”, (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2025). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
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