Second Coming No. 475 — May 9, 2026
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
Vance Hedderel
No One Will Write to the Pope…
…to canonize her. What she isn’t
is Eva Perón. Not Imelda Marcos.
Michèle Duvalier, hardly that.
No one will keep her corpse
at the dinner table. No one will laugh
when her plane stops mid-flight to return
to Rome because she forgot to buy cheese.
Not a soul will wonder at the refrigerated room
in Haiti so she can wear her furs comfortably.
She is no Grace Mugabe, spending
through Europe while Zimbabwe collapses.
She’d never shield a body from bullets
before being hanged like sausage in Milan.
Not repugnant enough to spark the Arab Spring
or house a tiger in the mansion.
She is crude graffiti on a military green jacket.
Marble halls bleeding with vermillion trees.
She is plagiarism. Words with no meaning.
A slapped hand. Ill at ease touching a man.
She is that. Banal, trite. Not even sad.
Vance Hedderel’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Chelsea, Poetry East, White Wall Review, Cape Rock, and other journals. His performance pieces include Should Women Hang? and A Seminar on Hate and Desire. He is a fellowship grant recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts.
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I like the notion she’s not good enough, not bad enough, just meh.