VQR Online

When we reached Genoa, and the sea did not
open, and we were offered homes or exile,
there was little choice.

When I first see Sherene, I can’t help wondering why a teenaged girl is hanging around the clinic on a Saturday afternoon. She is slim, compact, and wears an extremely short denim skirt and a red wool halter-top but seems youthfully...

Crossing the Iowa prairies, Dvorak found in the waving grasses, in the sway & whorl of foxtail that let loose a rasping he loved, sorrow he never explained.

While visiting a church in Guadalupe in 1917, David Alfaro Siquieros, the great muralist painter of the Mexican Revolution, found, “along with broken candelabras and other typical church adornments,” a “true mountain” of small paintings...

You were afraid to open, but when you did,

There she was asking to borrow a candle. 

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train

A container ship the size of a prone Chrysler Building slides silently past me, at eye level, close enough to touch. Multicolored intermodal containers, the red blood cells of global commerce, are stacked a hundred feet high on the deck...

I remember when my body
was a friend,

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

Dulce Pinzón wanted to revise our idea of superheroes.

As a photographer living in New York in the days after 9/11, she became fascinated by the intense images of extraordinary heroism on that day—heroism that, she is quick to point out...