VQR Online

Cutting down Chambers St. 

my pinky toenail comes clean off.

Another little ghost 

 Despite President Trump’s fatuous protests about the “Deep State,” we seem to be in a similar place with respect to entertainment relating to the intelligence community, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular.

What if each time
you caused pain
a small, round stone
was put in your pocket
pebbles for inducing
self-doubt

What happens when immigrant-rights advocates reach a breaking point?

I wish we were living
a story of desire, but
I don’t feel Odysseus 
beating out his tale
of longing at the oars

The Practice of Looking Deeply

That one smelled 
like a Bradford pear 
you said. 

Reney’s bones can feel a fight long before the rest of her wakes to the rising voices and clattering bottles. She is eight, almost nine. Granny and Lula live in a new rent house across the tracks and down a long hill, not so very far. Over...

St. Stephen’s Day: home unsettled, 
a rupture, and here the ruched 
branch has turned itself outward,

its soft, bright innards held up 
along the path. At first, a golden

The town of Dunwich, once a thriving medieval port on England’s Suffolk Coast, has for centuries been crumbling into the sea. All that now remains of the old structures is a small collection of hilltop ruins, flanked by a nineteenth-century...