VQR Online

As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...

the lake becomes a ghost. i decide
to lie down in its place. for comfort,
i polish its bed smooth, quilt a pallet 

On June 17, 1951, natives of the Ukrainian village Liskuvate began parting ways with everything they’d ever known. Earlier that year, the Soviet Union put a plan in motion to acquire Polish land that held valuable coal deposits.

VQR columnist Laura Kolbe’s series of essays considers American art through poet and physician Kolbe’s own personal and experiential lens.

A finger so tender 
the diminishing coneflower’s center shocks        
a needle

up through reaching skin

I pull down my black dress 
& feed my child. 

 Outside the window, other women stare soberly, unchosen. I haven’t just given a person one hundred dollars. I’ve given hundreds of people nothing.

And when the rains came 
   like lean wolves 

we were ready.

Sister Angela is wearing the softest robe I have ever touched. Her hearing aids are out and her dentures crunch as they settle. She is beaming at me from the dark, her face soft from sleep, her small body laundry-scented.

The white slap of the moon after hail gone through
ivy to silver April’s first green blades: There I listened