Skip to main content

VQR Online

Evil

September 8, 2020

I used to believe there was so much evil in the world,
and though I’m the gentlest of all my friends, I never saw a rose in a vase

Boneyard

March 2, 2020

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

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

Illustration by Landis Blair

The Year 2003 Minus 20

March 2, 2020

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 there—standing on a chair rolling up balls of dough as Granny’s hearing aids whistle, or lying curled into Granny’s great body napping—is Reney’s best place. But Reney knows that her place is with her mom.

Pegasus

March 2, 2020

Before I leave for good, I lift the pie server a final 
time, drop the receipt facedown next to the lemon 
blueberry slice, then my apron in the parking lot

<i>Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA</i>. By Amaryllis Fox. Knopf, 2020.240. HB, $26.95.

A Most Wanted Woman

March 2, 2020

 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.

Junker

March 2, 2020

That one smelled 
like a Bradford pear 
you said. 

Shades of Gloom

March 2, 2020

We’re a worried bunch, we Americans. We’re anxious. We’re gloomy, even doomy. We’re angsty, despairing, depressed. There’s a widespread sense that things are certainly not right with the world, and perhaps not right with us. If Dickens were with us, he might call it the most uncool of times.

Ars Poetica

March 2, 2020

Cutting down Chambers St. 

my pinky toenail comes clean off.

Another little ghost 

Pages