VQR Online

the belief was eels were male catfish,
believe if you leave a fried one alone 
return to red-raw meat, or a trickle 
trail of blood and crumb, a resurrection

“Up!” she signals, syllabic cup
     meaning wherever I am now—up
or down—floor, high chair—change direction!—

Sometime before I turned twenty, I was saved twice from dying. Neither time was by my design or choice.

It follows you everywhere,
I think, even this hillside
of mint and yellow gorse
on the far side of the sea,

I live in rural Scotland, in a village of sixty-five houses, with no cell service or shops. There is a kirk, a pub; there are more sheep than people. For the first time in my life, I have a garden. A garden with more square footage than my...

the lake becomes a ghost. i decide
to lie down in its place. for comfort,
i polish its bed smooth, quilt a pallet 

Reading the Scars of Climate Change

Even here. Even now the heavy industry
of the everyday, making to be unmade,
where a word is the world between us.

As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...

the lake becomes a ghost. i decide 
to lie down in its place. for comfort, 
i polish its bed smooth, quilt a pallet