Barbara Crooker: Late Painters | Matisse
When his hands could no longer hold a brush,
Matisse turned to paper and scissors, “painting”
with cold metal carving heavy gouache
shearing shallow reliefs.
Ramzy Baroud: ‘We Lost Everything, But We Are Still Standing’ | Letters from Gaza
None of those who communicated with me throughout the war have ever questioned their faith, and have often, if not always, begun their messages by checking on me, and my children.
Thomas McGuire: Grief Observed
A host of magpie kith and kin come
Back to tend and keen the fallen.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Stages of Grief
17 years since my son’s death, and still, each night when my husband drifts off, I watch movies, write, or read. Anything to stay awake.
Matthew Parker: A Solution to the Untold Imbecility of the Uninoculated
Wonko, a subsidiary of Natural Selection’s Been Slacking (NSBS), introduces its brand-new line of Weapons of Mass Vaccination (WMVs).
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Alice Friman: The Road Not Taken
I stood at the window
leaning my head, there
where the glass was cool
and looked out at the trees
bare now in January
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Vicky Bond: The Commercial Fishing Industry Is Destroying Vital Marine Ecosystems
The unsustainable practice of killing fish for human consumption not only harms them but countless other marine animals die as “unintended” bycatch in reckless fishing operations or lose their lives to the fishing industry’s widespread ocean pollution and habitat destruction, which is damaging our oceans beyond recovery.
Nidia Hernández: Templanza | Fortitude
turtles
blend their swimming with the sea
Abby Zimet: Deny, Defend, Depose: They Eat Off Your Family Member’s Grave
Exposing “the rotten core of American health care,” the shooting of United Health’s CEO/ mafia kingpin sparked a flash flood of long-simmering fury at the “legalized murder practiced by all … Continue reading
