Lola Haskins: Field Notes
You were born breathing water.
Grown, you push your prey from the air
into the basket of your legs
o angel bright as grass
hovering above the red flowers.
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.
Video: The commencement address that Harvard suppressed for mentioning genocide
Who are the people who remind you of your worth and give you the courage to try again? And who are the people who sit with you as we witness the moral injuries of our time?
Collaborative Poem: Spring Gone Missing
I once believed I knew how much a life is worth.
Joseph Bathanti: Women’s Prison
we round up the kids and bundle them
into a restored salvaged Bluebird school bus,
repainted green, and make the long haul
to Raleigh where their mothers are locked
in Women’s Prison.
Tony Gloeggler: A Good Bad Day
John walks slowly up the stairs
to my office every day. Between
four and four-thirty, after the bus
brings him home from day program
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Petition for this Day
May my modest routines appease me today, I who
raged against them for so long —
James Crews: Consider the Lilies
Consider these lilies, how
they’d never call themselves
broken simply because they
had to live in darkness
and cold for months
Donna Hilbert: Ode to Purple
O eggplant, O plum, O yard full of iris,
O purple beanie crocheted by Aruni
O overblown phrases, and broken
and bruised, beating hearts.
Bring it all on!
Langston Hughes | Beaumont to Detroit: 1943
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan.
Charles Harper Webb: Appetite
The crowds seem endless, tramping past
the Hunger Artist’s straw-filled cage to see
the panther’s glinting teeth and lethal stride.
Kari Gunter-Seymour: A History of Fireworks
It’s July 1st. Whose idea it was to wait
I can’t remember, but me, my son
and two granddaughters, nine and ten,
are at the fireworks warehouse
Gerald Fleming: Two Somethings
He could have run marathons, triathlons, could have blundered through densest jungles barefoot, quick-macheted, and not been prepared for this. He could have caressed the skin of a hundred women or men, every texture, every shade, but now this….
