VQR Online

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 

On June 17, 1951, natives of the Ukrainian village Liskuvate began parting ways with everything they’d ever known. Earlier that year, the Soviet Union put a plan in motion to acquire Polish land that held valuable coal deposits.

VQR columnist Laura Kolbe’s series of essays considers American art through poet and physician Kolbe’s own personal and experiential lens.

A finger so tender 
the diminishing coneflower’s center shocks        
a needle

up through reaching skin

I pull down my black dress 
& feed my child.