VQR Online

I am an architectural marvel, a gleaming façade, a mirror in the middle of an urban wasteland. And yet, I am invisible. You might think—

The outsized grandeur of the boreal can still appear so wild, so endless, it’s hard for newcomers to recognize the loss. Each generation’s perception of normal is molded by the environment they encounter, masking the gradual fade, a...

My sense of gratitude seems to have grown with time. I feel grateful about as often as I need to pee, which these days is a matter of minutes more than hours. 

the ogre of gratitude dangling like a chandelier from the rearview mirror asks if
you know how lucky you are, if you’ve meditated on that yet, if your heart

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

This issue continues a run of powerful photodocumentary work for VQR, beginning with Michael O. Snyder’s narrative portrait of drag-queen culture in a northern Appalachian town in the 2023 Spring/Summer double issue, followed in the Fall by...

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve.