VQR Online

Kimo is early, anxious. He propped open the doors of his bodega hours ago, left his oldest son, Mohammed, behind the counter. Now he’s outside the Department of Consumer Affairs, which doesn’t open for another forty-five minutes. Nine-to...

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.

At a writing conference several years ago, I had gone straight from the airport to a reception held by an organization that had given me a prize the previous year. The event was in the side room of a restaurant and there was cake. I love...

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts; 
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

The diggers have been gone less than a year. In the grown-over patches on the slope of Mpama South, emptied anchovy tins rust in the dirt beside strips of tarp, thick plastic jugs, and waxy cartons of mango juice squeezed flat at the waist...

It wasn’t so much that we burnt tires, releasing a toxic stew of nasties,
or that each Eleventh Night, as a spat crescendoed, some fella got battered 

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.
I stooped to measure it inside a dream.
A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee. 

As reproductive technology outpaces US immigration law, families struggle to stay together.

The old Hitachi dual cassette was pain
and elegant with age, and the branches were, 
and the sash window was open with pain, 
and the afternoon was adequate, and pain.