VQR Online

They were the eighth plague visited upon Egypt: When Pharaoh refused to free the people of Israel, Exodus tells us, Moses stretched out his staff and a wind rose from the east, blowing hard for one day until a vast swarm of locusts arrived...

hovering their mouths 

like two men 

moments before 

they turn on each other

that is how the grass smells 

In a nondescript hotel in East Texas, I fell
in love with a couple. There in the dim

hallway with rugs that were clean enough
but darkly patterned to hide the stains so who knows,

her back was against the wall, her arms up and around
his neck...

Much has changed in America and American poetry in the nearly forty years since Richard Howard published his expanded edition of 1969’s Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. The 1980 table of...

the hive swells outside
as its residents itch to lick our inner walls 

for moisture and respite 

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