VQR Online

As I write this, a deadly virus that originated in bats from central China has brought the global economy to its knees, silenced world capitals, halted air travel, and killed over two hundred thousand people. The largest economic-stimulus...

why she had six children,
your mother’s mother
who liked math and science,

Lighted room. Man and Woman enter talking.

—I mean, we built the world.

—What do you mean?

When he was small,
I rented a little studio 
in a building on Ninety-Fifth Street so I could have a room 
of my own to write. The studio was the size of a bathroom.

Mainly, she wanted to be left alone. She didn’t want a husband or a wife or a partner or a lover, she didn’t want a companion or a pet or friends, she didn’t want to be closer to her parents or siblings or relatives. She enjoyed her...

like a game show or some other excuse
for selling toothpaste. Wish I could remember who said that, 

“No man is an island, entire of itself.” So observed John Donne, memorably, in 1624, a year before bubonic plague beset London, killing some forty thousand people. No man is an island—unless isolated, a cognate word whose currency manifests...

If someone was kind enough to take us driving out to the long roads
that veered away from cornfields to the farms, pig roasts & parties