VQR Online

Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy may have pushed Burma from an isolated nation to potential partner to the rest of the world. But a trip deep inside the rebel camps tells a different story.

Finally there’s someone I might
and have and could one day 
want again, or tarry—

In remote northwest Myanmar, the traditional home to the headhunting Naga tribes, skulls are harder and harder to find.

Yesterday I shared a cab with a priest
who said it was a fine day to ride cross town 

If you leaned over
the peeling window ledge,
one tower of Notre Dame

That hazy, faintly discernible glow,
already half erased,
lodged in the corners of the night 

You smiled, slumped in your chair.
I was reclining. We talked but
not much was said. It was the day

How an insurgent movement of pro-democracy activists—from underground, in exile, or in prison—returned to take Burma’s military junta by political storm.