VQR Online

I start lucky. Two friends in Southeast Alaska have a permit and a boat and invite me to join them as a deckhand, gillnetting. For three summers, we share a bunk and work within a few feet of each other, coming back to Juneau most weekends...

All the rain in the world

is falling, making
a door you can’t open.

The ants arrived on Marfa’s first night at the ranch. They crawled into her bed in ceaseless organized columns. The creatures were harmless and died easily between her thumb and forefinger, but kept coming, and Marfa could not sleep

I’m lonely and the only Black person inside the paid Cézanne 

exhibit today.

The Dissonance of Living in the Anthropocene

It isn’t the trees but the space

between the trees,

My son suffered a gruesome injury at the beginning of summer—on the last day of school, just a few minutes before I picked him up from a get-together with his rat pack of middle-school pals. Tag in the woods behind the house, night coming...

What the Monongahela Taught Me

In a western Ukrainian town, a homeless community that served people for decades has taken on new meaning during the war.

I want my students to fall madly in love with Rosalind. She’s my favorite of all Shakespeare’s heroines, I tell them, pressing my hand to my heart, pretending to swoon.