Vox Populi

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

Video: Homesick

An absurdist thriller about an unhappy man who attends a retreat offering adults a second chance at a happy childhood. 

March 26, 2023 · 2 Comments

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

David Hassler: Intensive Care

Children under the age of fourteen weren’t allowed in the ICU. I was eleven, and my brother was thirteen, but no nurse or doctor was going to stop us from seeing our mother.

March 12, 2023 · 7 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

Kate Daniels: The Poem

Niobe had just lost her son.
To help herself, she read a poem
to those assembled in the funeral home

January 25, 2023 · 9 Comments

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

January 4, 2023 · 20 Comments

Tony Gloeggler: Working Class Heroes

My father opened the trunk, 
tossed me my glove with a worn 
hardball tucked in its pocket, eased 
into a catcher’s crouch as I paced 
60 feet away.

November 29, 2022 · 8 Comments

Neil Shepard: Local Freeze

Flat lines of black clouds 
rolled over the Everglades, pelting the land with cold rain, 
then, briefly, almost impossibly, hail, over the wetlands and dredged 
fields, reminding us how fragile the grapefruits and oranges.

November 15, 2022 · 5 Comments

Toi Derricotte: In Knowledge of Young Boys

i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to

November 14, 2022 · Leave a comment

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

October 19, 2022 · 12 Comments

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.”

October 13, 2022 · 9 Comments

Carol Frost: Now Soon

Father and mother time to rise up put away the dark
give back to him more than he can ever use give what is
not his to have what he never knew he knows and all he feels

September 5, 2022 · 8 Comments

Dawn Potter: About Mothers

How can I judge the worth of a brooding life?
In a busy restaurant my giant son leans his head on my shoulder,
and I am his mother again, lifting his memory into my arms.

August 22, 2022 · 4 Comments

Lisa Fay Coutley: Duplex

your son is a homeless drug addict your son is
your son is a homeless drug addict your son
until it becomes real

July 18, 2022 · 4 Comments

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