DELANEY DEFINES “PROVOCATIVE”

by Michelle DeRose

At not-yet one, he cannot toddle

but his baby thighs can yet befuddle.

At four, all crayon plots require shredding

and no legs may be revealed by leggings.

A woman’s toes? Oh, mercy me!

Two rows of cleavage, can’t you see?

A human knee, oh hold me back—

a frontal, bulbous, sexual attack!

They get desperate when we enforce the code

that won’t let decency erode.

Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose has published over a hundred poems in various journals, including multiple times in The New Verse News.

HOME IS WHERE

by Michelle DeRose

The Guardian, April 3, 2026

Runaway nuns seek familiar stairs,

years of ascent lodged in muscle memory.

Passages internalized like arteries,

layout so deeply embedded they could sleepwalk

to table, sanctuary. A return to rails

that held their hands through ages,

yielding their gloss to dry grasps

that clasp ever tighter. Rooms where

nightly they set their prayer beads on bedside stands.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find her most recent publication in Michigan Bards Poetry Anthology, North Coast Voices 2025: Poems of the Great Lakes, Dunes Review, and Autumn Sky Daily.

ON BITCHES PROMOTED TO FUCKIN BITCHES

by Michelle DeRose

Bitches bring whistles, not guns

to neighborhoods, with four-pawed

long-haired bitches in the back

of Pilots who wish to lick

six year-olds good-bye 

for the day, hope for walks

before they wag their packs

back home at 3. Lady Bitches

record, chat, encourage lunch,

smile. One proclaims no anger

at dudes, leaves windows down

even as she sees the threats

and lock doors. She leaps

to fuckin bitch by being so empty

of madness she drives him to it.

With bullets he wishes were his fist

he kisses the fuckin bitch good

night, hissin with piss that her cower

was inadequate, his power 

unacknowledged. He shows her. 

In this world all good 

bitches ride bullets to heaven.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is a poet and a mother; her son was once six years old, too.

HANDLER'S HANDS

by Michelle DeRose

First skin shrivels

without touch. Parent's

palm to baby's back

an initial prayer

for safe-keeping, offered

in heart's rhythm.

 

How maimed the hand 

that releases the leash

on a dog trained to maul.

Strokes fur to praise puncture,

urges sic, not stay.

Fingers turned incisors

on blue fields of fifty

rip red strips

on a father's back,

pierce our beating core.

A member of a foster family for newborn wards of the state of Illinois as she grew up, Michelle DeRose witnessed first-hand how simple touches soothed some of the many infants her mother nurtured. A life-long dog-lover and -rescuer, she still wonders if she and her husband rescue dogs or they rescue them. The perversion of this most basic of communication--love and calm conveyed when one living being gently touches another--blatantly revealed in ICE's actions in Washington state against Wilmer Toledo-Martinez should repulse us all.

READING THE WEAVING

by Michelle DeRose

It is the job of appointed bards

to blare new fables daily.

All hail the king! what they must sing

even when they know it’s silly.

 

The lyres are loud and always part

of making legends from myth,

like how each king saved everything

with a gift from an underground smith.

 

But there are other ways to tell a tale:

we know by now the value

of a shroud, a drape, of tapestries

because of what they tell you.

 

The besieged weave too, may hide their looms

but know well how to shuttle

‘round the rigid lines of what is warped,

are fully prepared to scuttle

 

the whole design if they’re so inclined–

some yarns are simply cruel.

Unraveling is a strategy

when you’re flanked by fools.

 

Some legends crafted from whole cloth

can be fought with embroidered cunning.

Let linens get thin with what’s not in,

say everything else with couching.

Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, Michelle lives and writes (mostly) from Grand Rapids, Michigan. This poem is for all the knitters, crocheters, and Aunt Tifas who were out in public with their arts on No Kings Day, carrying on a tradition at least as old as Penelope.

BEATRICE'S TURN

by Michelle DeRose

Beatrice (a Portrait of Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

If poets are the unacknowledged 

legislators of our world, then may

their list come out as a sonnet,

an epic, an elegy for their lost

childhoods. They have more cause

than Dante to assign names

to descending rings. Only in dreams

and nightmares have sinners paid,

limbs frozen in impotent angles

like bent wisps of straw, forced

to face forever through lids locked

on open how their flesh partook in fraud.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, where she sometimes used her specialty in epic poetry in her teaching. Every new nation/kingdom/regime established in an epic is built upon or requires the destruction of another.

THE LARGE ONES HAVE JOINED I.C.E.

by Michelle DeRose

My grade school had no gymnasium.

The auditorium hosted PE class

on rain-darkened days or those slick 

with ice, the low stage across the front

shrouded in its thick brown curtain.

Sometimes a tumbling mat and low-

mounted 2 x 4 meant gymnastics,

balance practice as we dip-stepped

across the board, arms in airplane wings,

or body control while we somersaulted.

But when upcoming plays or assemblies

required a clear floor, rain meant dodgeball.

The largest classmates hurled soccer

and volley balls at the tiny and slow.

Me with two friends, hidden in folds.

Even across the room, a direct hit

could bruise, slap, jangle teeth. The large

ones were praised for their power,

their aim, the swiftness with which

one by one they took us out.

We just hoped to be unnoticed behind the brown,

that our quiet retreat to art’s cloaked stage

would enable us to endure the long hour,

return to our desk where Stuart Little

waited in its belly for us.

Michelle DeRose is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is writing a poem a day in her retirement. It might not be enough for sanity under the current administration in the US. She invites all who yearn for a holy heart attack to meditate on it at 10 a.m. EST every day.

FIRST CONTACT

by Michelle DeRose

Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil (file photo above) was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time Thursday after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass barrier. —NPR, May 22, 2025

Tuck that baby in close. He needs
to hear your beats; you, to smell
his hair. Skin itching for touch,
building bonds by contact. Once,
an old man in a home pressed
palms to pane. His daughter prayed
along, her breath frosting the air.
Neighbors hung curtains on shared
lines, clasped amidst the plastic.
Twice in recent life they advised
no contact: to slow the spread
of a spiked virus and to wedge 
between father and his newborn son
an unwarranted block of ice.

 
Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find her most recent publications in ONE ART, Panoply, One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology), and The New Verse News. 

SNOW WHITE VISITS JAIL FOR A PHOTO OP

by Michelle DeRose

Kristi Noem wears gold Rolex to inspect tattooed inmates at El-Salvador mega-prison —Yahoo! news, March 28, 2025

Everything so black and white.
Her long-sleeved tee, teasingly tucked.
Black ball cap, curled tresses.
Their shirtless tattoos lined up
an aisle of canned beans.
Shaven heads beneath harsh lights.
A long shot—men stacked
like face-masked firewood in the hold.
Her lipstick. Gold around her wrist.
Their cuffs. Her arsenal.

Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Michigan, where one of the most prestigious state universities in the nation just announced its closure of its DEI offices. She wishes she were Canadian.

PICTURES OF PEACE IN OUR TIME, PROTECTION IN OUR DAY

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.

AMERICAN REQUIEM

by Michelle DeRose

with a nod to Anna Akhmatova

 

Justice for Dr. Teresa Borrenpohl: a GoFundMe

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.

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.

DEFENSIVE POSTURE

by Michelle DeRose

On the DOD placing Julianne Moore’s Freckleface Strawberry under “compliance review” in Pentagon schools.


We hereby commit to fight freckles fearlessly.
The Pentagon’s five year-olds are too young
to learn that some are born freckled,
or that some assigned freckleface at birth
fade with age: it’s our official position
that none may transition. Further,
the book’s fruitist agenda betrays its bias
by elevating only the strawberry. We cannot
in good conscience allow any book
that won’t praise the apple in our curriculum.
We find additional offense in the redheads:
a clear red cap trademark violation.
Finally, the author’s first name puts two women
together. We vow to end such indoctrination!


Michelle DeRose, Professor Emerita of English, lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her poetry won the Chancellor's Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan, and her chapbooks were finalists in the 2023 and 2024 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press competition.

IN PRAISE OF SMALL THINGS

by Michelle DeRose

Things too small to hold
today’s news: the fingernail
of a newborn, sharpened
tip of this pencil, a candle
flame, our old Tom’s purr.
The last breath of a dissolving
mint, the dog’s white brow
curling in her brown patch.
The chip of slate my six
year-old once passed me.
Hold it in your hand and it will soothe
you, he said. And it does.

Michelle DeRose, Professor Emerita of English, lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her poetry won the Chancellor's Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan, and her chapbooks were finalists in the 2023 and 2024 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press competition.

A BANNER DAY IN FLORIDA

by Michelle DeRose

Alan Gratz’s “Ban This Book” tells the tale of a fourth-grader’s quest to bring her favorite book back to the school library after officials had it removed. Late last month, a Florida school district banned “Ban This Book.” A parent involved in Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parents-rights group, submitted a complaint about the book in February, alleging that it depicted sexual conduct and was “teaching children to be social justice warriors.” Though a school district committee recommended that “Ban This Book” be kept on shelves, the Indian River County school board voted to ban it last month. —The Washington Post, June 13, 2024

So thin bands of women who love 
liberty (because their heads-of-households 
told them to) banned the book 
Ban This Book. If words don’t build it, 
it never happened. Scrub climate change
from state websites and Florida’s coast 
rises like Lazarus. Certain words, like loaves
and fishes, work double miracles. 
With no gender queers, some gun 
violence disappears in a pulse. 
Requiring proof of rape for abortions 
erases abortion and rape with a stranger’s
magic wand that, waved in a yard,
transforms twelve year-olds to the most noble
profession. They might wed NFL stars,
be the next to erase abuse in their world,
just a giant pink rubber in their clutch.

Michelle DeRose is Professor Emerita of English from Aquinas College. She lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

SHEEP-KILLING DOG

by Michelle DeRose

Texas AG Ken Paxton steps in to make a woman’s life hell. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Big hats welcome but not a Texas uterus
they won’t probe, tell you how
you can wear it in public,
a watched portal to the baby chute
they need it to be. I guess
to make future bullseyes? Because
there’s also not a barrel
they will look down, keep out
of campuses. In Texas
all depends on the tunnel. 
Barrels determine themselves but canals
are hyper-policed. At the end of every story
is a woman bleeding, empty, and an Attorney
General smug and whole as he always was.

Michelle DeRose hopes she can retire from teaching at the college level before she must relive a school shooting, and she is grateful she doesn't live in Texas. She teaches creative writing and African American, Irish, and world literature at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.