Vox Populi
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Michael T. Young: The Spoils of War
A little girl grips the one toy she was allowed to carry away through crowds stumbling together from their homes. A stuffed animal—maybe a rabbit or cat. Whatever name she gives it is infected with the stench of displacement. It’s a name that will nest inside her like a flightless bird. If she makes it from the streets of Donetsk to the border with her parents, in years to come, it will hatch on a day cleaning a closet, when she pulls this animal from the back and immediately smells smoke and hears sirens in every direction. She will feel heat off a burning car blackening the façade of the local theater. Images will return of a neighbor boy, the one with the chipped tooth that made him whistle when he said her name. Did he make it? Or his parents? She will sit on the floor and hold, again, the soft shape of what remains broken.
Copyright 2022 Michael T. Young
Michael T. Young’s third collection of poems The Infinite Doctrine of Water was published by Terrapin Books. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.
A woman huddles with a child in a makeshift bomb shelter in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
Vox Populi 
Powerful. Thank you
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Thank you, Barbara.
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Sweet and soft.
War is spoiling lives of millions across the middle east. Including the north eastern corner of Syria where American army is fighting with the Kurds for a separate zone. It happened to be the place of oil and natural gas resources. Now the rest of Syria is living in utter cold dark long days.
Ukraine was the last circle of chain of disasters.
I hope we can silence guns soon.
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Thank you, Saleh.
Yes, indeed, I too hope the guns can be silenced soon.
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