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the ogre of gratitude dangling like a chandelier from the rearview mirror asks if
you know how lucky you are, if you’ve meditated on that yet, if your heart

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

This issue continues a run of powerful photodocumentary work for VQR, beginning with Michael O. Snyder’s narrative portrait of drag-queen culture in a northern Appalachian town in the 2023 Spring/Summer double issue, followed in the Fall by...

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve. 

She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them 
A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion

With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, 
He thought, and picking them with her strong hands,

Steve, though he’d cut you
if you crossed him, drop you like a sack
of potatoes if you came at him drunk
like Randy Parr in the backyard,

Many parents know firsthand how cannabis can transform the lives of children with severe illness. Why won’t the legal system listen to them?