Theme: Witness

Overview: To witness is to participate in existence—to observe its beauty and chaos, its fleeting moments and enduring truths. It is to stand at the threshold of the known and unknown, the real and surreal, and testify to the act of seeing and being seen. What does it mean to be a witness to the liminal spaces, the overlooked objects, or the moments that slip through our fingers? How does the act of witnessing alter both the observer and the observed?

Audi Locus seeks works that explore this theme with existential depth and surreal imagination. Show us what it means to be the witness, the watched, or the space in between.

Submissions are open to poetry, art, and music that resonates with the theme. Bring us your ghosts, your blurred edges, your glimpses through the veil. Witness the world, and let it witness you.

Submission Period: April 01 - May 31, 2025

Poetry: submit here.
Music + Art: audilocusblog@gmail.com

What the theme means to us:

Maudie:
To witness is to see, and I am asking you to proclaim what you’ve seen. What do you notice? What aches within you? What does it feel like to be seen—truly seen—or to have your existence distorted by someone else’s gaze? Consider moments of tragedy: did you look away, or did you let it etch itself into your memory? What do you carry silently that demands to be shouted? Think about the times when your voice felt lost, when the world watched but did not act—and let that voice rise to the surface.

Brandon:
As a noun—a person who sees an event; an offeror of evidence; or even the evidence itself.
As a verb—to see, to have knowledge of, to openly profess.
As a statement—an undeniable perspective, sure of itself.
As a question—a lingering uncertainty of what observed data means and suggests.

Give me your certainties, your questions, your juxtapositions. Do battle on the page, the canvas, the stanza and  confront me with indisputable images. Or, do none of that, like bright metal on a sullen ground.