Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.

Cynthia Atkins: Hairbrush

He’d fall asleep on my chest, breath light as a falling leaf.
Now, he glides the bristles down my neck— He gently fluffs
the tufts, like airing the pillows.

March 15, 2023 · 14 Comments

Valerie Bacharach: Chaos

There is no word for parents who have lost a child. Our language is chaotic. We are not widowed or orphaned. We are without, we are incomplete.

March 10, 2023 · 14 Comments

Patricia Nugent: It Feels Bad

It feels bad that we are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have women’s equality built into its constitution. 

March 9, 2023 · 9 Comments

Robert Wrigley: Self-Pity

Sometimes, in private—another room at least,
another building all the better—you can bask
in the balm and rage of it, you can as a dog does
roll in it like a dead fish on the grass

March 5, 2023 · 18 Comments

Molly Fisk: Death, Herself

UNDRESS, SHE SAID by Doug Anderson, Four Way Books, Tribeca 2022, 102 pages, $17.95 . .             You might think, opening Doug Anderson’s fourth poetry collection Undress, She Said, that a man … Continue reading

March 3, 2023 · 10 Comments

James Crews: A Few Things I Have Learned

Watching birds will save you on a daily basis—the shaggy barred owl clinging to a pine branch with its deadly claws, eyes lazing in the glaze of a winter morning, head swiveling back and forth.

February 28, 2023 · 5 Comments

Matthew J. Parker: The Era of Idiocy

I did over a decade in jails and prisons because a squad of Pence-like puritans felt it immoral of me to get high on anything other than the drooling drunkenness of alcohol, an endeavor not only baldly hypocritical but so too borderline absurd; a worldwide farce manifesting in the militarization of both the cartels and the police, all of which, of course, was and is more great news for arms dealers.

February 22, 2023 · 4 Comments

James Davis May: Hot Sex

she asks him,
resigned panic in her voice, Did you
slice one of those serranos into the guac?

February 14, 2023 · 17 Comments

David Hassler: Spaghetti Dinners

I pour Lynn a glass of wine and make a toast: “To our future life together.” We stare into each other’s eyes and smile. Unable to wait any longer, I ask Lynn if she will marry me. She says yes, and I begin to cry. I am here, in this place, with a beautiful woman who loves me.

February 13, 2023 · 10 Comments

Barbara Hamby: Reading Can Kill You 

Yes was Da, which is so much more Yes than Yes
but with a twinge of Nyet, and it was winter, a freezing Siberian
blizzard with days that began at ten and ended at two

February 13, 2023 · 10 Comments

Michael Simms: Daisy

After you died, I pulled a copy of Gatsby
From your shelf — torn, underlined, smudged
With marginalia — but still beautiful
In an unbound unglued sort of way.

February 11, 2023 · 36 Comments

Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise

One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.

February 11, 2023 · 4 Comments

Kim Ports Parsons: May the Particles of My Body Travel the Endless Conduits

When I die, lay me in the loam under the big oak
on the path through the woods, deep down in the endless
flow of talk among the trees there…

February 5, 2023 · 15 Comments

David Kirby: Taking it home to Jerome

Everything else was to come, everything about love:
the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken.

February 2, 2023 · 5 Comments

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