VQR Online

On Disability and Desire

On a narrow plinth in the corner 
of the gallery, a stone portrait:
a man, his mouth unlipped

“You’ve come in the worst conditions,” Paddy Howe says drolly. It’s September and the seaside town of Lyme Regis is still basking in summer.

Margo’s daughter came home from school that Friday with a new friend. From the window in the kitchen, where she was trying and failing to make decent croissants for the third time this week, Margo watched the bus deposit her eight-year-old...

Like heat he seeks them, 
            my son, thirsting 
to learn those

he don’t know 
            are his dead— 
some with his name

The man appeared suddenly, out of the darkness and around the bend. He was standing to the side of the asphalt, near the edge of the floodlights illuminating a barricade of orange traffic barrels and, beyond, a great pile of dirt...

A March sky pinned with stars—
purple, almost, and a blue mist in the wheat stubble.
Under the laburnum, we waited—
the chains of leaf, its cascades of gold flower
gone, and the whole tree drooping

Deepfakes—videos altered by artificial intelligence—have begun warping our reality.

Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati, researcher and professor at Arizona State University and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial...

Women used to wean their babies
By painting their breasts black.
Hurricane clouds are black.
The Earth is weaning us.

 Take today. I want there

            to be less
of everything—wind

& worry, of leaves
            littering the ground
& love letters, addressee