Hend Salama Abu Helow: Olive Trees Tie Palestinians to Our Homeland. Israel Treats Them as a Threat
They feared the olive trees — the trees that know, more than anyone, who the true owners of this land are.
Charlotte Matthews: Draw With Your Eyes Closed
On Fridays, we drew animals with our eyes closed. Mrs. Plath said it could be anything we wanted. So, there we were: 25 six-year-olds bent over manila paper, crayons in stubby … Continue reading
Ghada Abu Muaileq: In Gaza, Even the Cost of a Grave Has Become a Luxury
We tear up chairs for firewood. Soap is watered down to make it last. Basic necessities are increasingly out of reach.
Baron Wormser: Distressed
Since grade school when I was hunched under my desk during an air-raid drill, I have been distressed by the specter of the atomic bomb.
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
William Trowbridge: Polio Days
July of 1949 was especially hot in Omaha, but the polio epidemic got most of the news coverage. Across the country, hospitals were filling up.
Matthew J. Parker: The Continuing Fallacy of Our Word Salad Sandwiches
I shot up heroin for 25 years and never had a problem. I shot up fentanyl once and it almost killed me.
Adam Patric Miller: A Teacher’s End of the Year Reflection
I can choose to motivate students by manipulating their fear of grades or I can subvert their ideas about grades and inspire them to learn because a good human being becomes a better human being when they are learning for real.
Rachel Hadas: Pastorals
Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train, a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.
Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
