Lisa Zimmerman: Missing Billy
You wore sobriety like a t-shirt
with the sleeves hacked off.
Michael Simms: Sacred Sleep
My sleep is punctuated with terror
and excursions into weirdness,
and I usually wake in the dark hours
Cynthia Atkins: Apocalypse in Twitter-Verse
Is that, finally,
the ache we shed with the last breath. —
Fogged faces passing on a train, trees
and smoke and hills.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Forgetting the Year
remember the day at the beach when the sun
began to explain Heidegger to you while thunderclouds
rumbled up from the horizon like Nazi submarines?
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: An Open Thank You Letter to Kristen Who Works at the Cemetery
There are moments so flooded with tenderness
every wall around our heart collapses
from the beauty of it
Vox Populi: The 15 most popular posts of 2022
During 2022, Vox Populi published 737 posts including poetry, essays and short films. Here are the fifteen most visited.
Video: Night Visit (Mature)
Ruthie spends an unusual night with a guy from her village. After discovering the troubling circumstances that led to their unexpected romantic encounter, she must seek the truth and find her own way to confront him. (Subtitled)
Nancy Krygowski: “Here’s a Partial List of Mass Shootings in the United States So Far This Year”
Here’s the full list of the people the murdered have kissed.
Here’s a pair of slippers made of birds’ beaks, ear plugs made of screams.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Prayers
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
John Crowe Ransom: Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese
Baron Wormser: Against Hope
Hope gives us a margin for our industriousness that keeps inventing new purposes for new machines, an industriousness that often seems to be only making everything worse.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Embracing the Mess
I like it best when the memories are everywhere—
and I stumble over the ghosts of wooden train tracks,
trip on the spot where you used to do push-ups
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: A Good Man
To this day, my sister and I wonder if Dad
Got it right. “Fear,” he explained years later,
“Is sometimes the only tool.”
Lasse Söderberg: For Tomas Tranströmer
You know the broken history of things,
the alchemy of stones, a world masked
in the blind light of God.
