VQR Online

A summer rain front laces a trailing hat of mist
around the headland’s mountain: a saucer of mist
scraping the treetops    hanging over rock outcrops

Alec, I said you’d be around
by stratagem or shift
looking for a lift
to the somewhere burial ground

For the subsistence fishermen of the Kuna Yala Islands, the greatest danger is the encroaching ocean they depend on.

In back wards, sea spray thinning ash as the city
turned from itself, the ocean which brought it, faces off

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.

The regular VQR contributor has been wounded in Libya.