VQR Online

To say he wasn’t having fun would be imprecise.

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal but popular war on drugs has forced the Catholic Church to ask itself a defining question: What is its responsibility under an immoral regime?

I am the man in the play-
ground, the cord of his earbuds

clenched in his teeth
(bit in a horse’s mouth)

Richard is on his front porch smoking a cigarette; the rest of the street is deserted. From his chair you can see a round, white surveillance camera at the end of the block, craning from its mount on a telephone pole. Per capita, Lancaster...

if this city is still breaking me  
in with its weather and tethered eye

you be the arch in my neck 
the mane growing from it 

At Home in the Water Crisis

I moved into the haunted house
and gutted it to the bones. I wasn’t alone then,

and worked there as a team. 
We evicted squirrels from their vast nutshell nest,

filled dumpsters with fifty years of trash.

It’s true. We’re useless without our vaginas.
How will you rape us? How will we birth daughters
and sons? I understand. We should laugh.
It would be better if we did, Mr. Duterte. 
In India, our leaders say eating chow mein
excites the hormones...

On Forms and Influences

          my heaven innard
turned to land

        apostled lips