VQR Online

Between Los Angeles and Oakland, 
there was snow on the grass-covered mountains,
which made a strange pattern, like brushstrokes
on paper.

In the end 
the world is empty 
enough to move in 
—to learn how best to hold a lantern 
drunk in the forestdark— 
 

With her essay “Social Distortions,” Laura Kolbe wraps up a brief but impressive run as a columnist for this magazine: six installments that brought more than three dozen works—from film to textiles to sculpture—to bear on essays that are...

Tired of silence, tired of rock, tired of orchestration,
let me tune us in this evening to FM 91.1, The Point: 
“All y’all’s favorite home for the candid sounds 
of people sleeping.” 

The scene was picturesque: In the summer of 2021, the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself on the edge of a verdant cliff, where the forest hugged the sea. Here, in the Calanques, the clouds gliding across the sky appeared...

your hand swells my neck, pretty, you say
i am, no matter how decimal-small. 
my eyelash flutters across your shoulder.
gravity. you land on my chest skin—

In photojournalism, there are two kinds of pictures. One delivers the news with shocking precision: The image of a drowned Syrian child washed up on a beach in Turkey; the spectacular, eerie stillness of a protester about to be arrested in...

say i was a careless shutting
of language an accident
sound whirling into the guttur