VQR Online

What’s the thin break / inescapable, a sudden thud / on the porch, a phone / vibrating with panic on the nightstand?

Out here, I’m lonely enough to open / my body for anyone that finds me

There’s no such thing as bushfire season anymore. It’s all year round, and even now in winter there is a total fire ban in place.

You can’t control what people make of you. / Some see sacrifice / where others see torture

Some mornings, I come to on the floor, / my neck burned with moon tracks

One day, I drove the hundred miles east to visit T at Ironwood and was denied visitation. The clerk told me there was no record of my request. Never mind that I had been visiting my son there every Saturday for five years.

Like an ermine looping through the snow, mouth a pink line, / I’m suited for my habitat.

I’m writing a play about a Kommandant at Auschwitz / who recognizes one of the Jewish prisoners/ as a famous poet

Where is the opioid crisis headed?

Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.