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Four hundred million dollars rescinded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.

POLICE VIOLENCE IN REVERSE

a gigan

by Susan Vespoli 

Three bullets pop from the back of my son’s head

shiny, bloodless, sailing up the barrel of a gun

that tucks itself into the holster at the hip

of a 25-year-old policeman who still dreams

of the person he shot 11 months earlier,

still jolts awake screaming,      I’m sorry!

My son, no longer dead, returns to the bus

and falls asleep, traveling to the previous morning          

at 6:00 a.m., where he and his unhoused comrades

 

slumber in the underpass tunnel by the freeway.

No thoughts of bullets enter his head. Cops who arrive

at daybreak look around, say, I’m sorry, do not tackle them, snicker,

arrest them for “sleeping in a public place.” Instead, they pass out blankets,

coffee, flyers for shelters; see the wheelchair, the crutches, the backpacks,

people shivering from the cold, not fear of the badge, the taunt, the violent

ego of those hired by taxpayers to be protectors, peacekeepers.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ where she believes in the power of writing to heal. Before her son was killed in March 2022, she told him about the poems she wrote about him and addiction in their family. He was quiet and then turned to her and said, "If the poems can help others, then good."

Editor's Note: The New Verse News previously published two of long-time contributor Susan Vespoli's poems about the killing of her son by police: "Before I Knew Adam Had Died" and "My Ex-Husband Calls To Tell Me Our Son Has Been Shot By Police."