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He woke me late last night. He sat on the edge of my bed with a bag in his lap. When I rolled over to turn the lamp on, he put the bag to my chest.

We need to go now, he said.

This time I didn’t question.

Wake with a kiss on your lips.
The sun steps down through trees.
You sit in the corner of my eye
all morning, working on something.

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone...

“Did you see the northern lights last night?” Captain Geiry asks. He smiles and tosses up his right hand, which is gloved by red insulated rubber, then shakes his head. “They were … amazing.”

Praised be friends. Praise enemies.
Praise the dark above.
Praise hangovers. Praise cigarettes.
The vulture and the dove.

A lucky rain
misted
the far hills to fresco

The regular VQR contributor has been wounded in Libya.

“Can you believe it?” my brother said, talking more to the air than to me. “They’re leaving us without a soccer field.”

“What?” I said to myself and went up to the roof, my favorite place in the house for the last few months. It was 1979.

In the spring of 1999, newly-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sent a letter to a man serving a life sentence in a French prison. Chávez addressed the prisoner (who is Venezuelan by birth) as a “distinguished compatriot,” and closed...

I’m stiff as a board, bored stiff
with living like this, with this
being half-crippled and adrift
like the ancients in the hospice.