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.
I once believed I knew how much a life is worth.
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?
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.
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
May my modest routines appease me today, I who
raged against them for so long —
Consider these lilies, how
they’d never call themselves
broken simply because they
had to live in darkness
and cold for months
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!
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan.
The crowds seem endless, tramping past
the Hunger Artist’s straw-filled cage to see
the panther’s glinting teeth and lethal stride.
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
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….
Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.
Aw, Dale, he didn’t mean it when he said I was the
best thing that ever happened to him. If he even said it,
chalk it up to the RKO publicity machine.