VQR Online

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 

At Home in the Water Crisis

I moved into the haunted house
and gutted it to the bones. I wasn’t alone then,

and worked there as a team. 
We evicted squirrels from their vast nutshell nest,

filled dumpsters with fifty years of trash.

It’s true. We’re useless without our vaginas.
How will you rape us? How will we birth daughters
and sons? I understand. We should laugh.
It would be better if we did, Mr. Duterte. 
In India, our leaders say eating chow mein
excites the hormones...

On Forms and Influences

          my heaven innard
turned to land

        apostled lips

to forgive me I masturbate 
then pray to God to forgive me 
I masturbate then hate myself 
after scrolling endlessly through 
porn I never find exactly what it is 
that I’m looking for because there is 
no category for my type of desire

This time, it begins after dark. There’s a solemnity that was absent from the previous day’s rituals, which I had witnessed when the sky was still light. “This time, we have to be serious. We can’t be jokey-jokey,” says Syafiq Dendi...