by Michelle DeRose
A paper badge held aloft over eyes
thirteen years’ wide, the funds to find
their cure cut. Texas brothers,
three and five, their mother dead
in the state’s bid to keep the unviable
alive. Women moved to men’s prisons
to prevent concussions in girls’ sports;
the study of injuries among girls removed.
Four hundred million dollars rescinded
for failure to stop campus harassment
one week after three Gentiles circled
and humiliated, pointed and shouted
to muffle the modestly dressed Jewish man’s
assertions he’s not playing that game.
This whether we like it or not.
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.
