VQR Online

Like a mouth set in the frozen ground.

& how our childhoods were informed by it—this innate sense
     of something missing.

In 1967, Viking Press published The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Moore’s only explanation for the dozens of published poems eliminated from her “complete” work consisted of the brief epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.”

Some days there is nothing
of the blues
     I can use
so I put down
my pen & walk instead

At first only fog lifting off
the snow and snow
     sifting through it,

Best advice I ever heard
I learned


at the poker table:
Shut up & deal.

The last evening I saw Granny Annie she was rocking in wicker, the whole porch creaking with the weight of her grief. All the neighbors and relatives had eaten and gossiped and gone, leaving their plates and tumblers and stains all over the...