VQR Online

Who looks in your mouth? Nobody. That cozy little cavern is designed for darkness and privacy. When the mouth is open, we glimpse occasional bits of action in what is technically called the vestibule, and are struck by the intimacy of what...

Only together holding hands in silence can I see what a field has done
to my mother, aunts, and uncles. 

On Mother’s Day 2019, I take Mama to the home of her best childhood friend for dinner. Her friend’s family includes a sister, a brother, her friend’s father (still grinning in his midnineties), and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins...

outside the viewer,
black                         outside a mention                  of orishas and speech 
about freeing

Wine between cacti and carnivorous flytraps,
our bodies syncing to the DJ’s bad decisions,
I can’t stop getting turned on

Caitlin Hata was initially alarmed by the dark alchemy of fermentation.

In his response to my first letter to him, Charles Wright said of my own decision to write poems, “I hope it gives you what it has given me—a life.” I took this wide view from such a hard gazer of a poet as both balm and call.

                                     leaves a race behind
                 takes on the music                                      pop
                 its relation                                                    to capital

In the dream my mother pours
a gallon of milk over my head
because her boyfriend held my hand
under the table.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors are like nonfiction writers: taking in the world and spitting it out in fewer dimensions with more meaning—maybe even some sense.