by Michelle DeRose
with a nod to Anna Akhmatova
Can you describe this? I said I can't.
Five weeks of maces swung wildly
at fragile national monuments. A demand
for five bullets, self-inflicted. Five-
alarm fires ignited from sea to renamed
sea. Three white stars deemed more
than four Black ones, extra credit
for the red hat, for looking central cast.
Fifty stars dangle below thirteen stripes
at 7569 feet. One woman dangles
from the dark-draped arms of three
Idaho coats. Blinkered eyes claim
caring plus competence equals a chainsaw.
Self-proclaimed American gods shed
no grace on Ukraine. Shame.
Five weeks of maces swung wildly
at fragile national monuments. A demand
for five bullets, self-inflicted. Five-
alarm fires ignited from sea to renamed
sea. Three white stars deemed more
than four Black ones, extra credit
for the red hat, for looking central cast.
Fifty stars dangle below thirteen stripes
at 7569 feet. One woman dangles
from the dark-draped arms of three
Idaho coats. Blinkered eyes claim
caring plus competence equals a chainsaw.
Self-proclaimed American gods shed
no grace on Ukraine. Shame.
Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancellor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Calliope, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology). She is participating in the 2025 Stafford Challenge—a cohort of poets who have committed to writing a poem a day for a year. The daily news supplies plenty of material for that effort.
