Poetry

With a squeal, the already
otherworldly broadcast
stuttered,
scattered,
leaving
only a tattered hiss.

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.

In the morning we found
40 acres of oaks
torn to the ground.

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan […]

If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not poetry? Quick, somebody tell Shakespeare.

Two VQR contributors are interviewed for “American Experience.”

The trick was breathing in, you claimed, as if that was all they gathered to watch as you milked the crowd in your matador sash, rum-slurring some speech no one could hear above the river’s thunder.

I can barely remember your face

After more than sixty years.

When we reached Genoa, and the sea did not
open, and we were offered homes or exile,
there was little choice.

Crossing the Iowa prairies, Dvorak found in the waving grasses, in the sway & whorl of foxtail that let loose a rasping he loved, sorrow he never explained.