Ruin
was rumored
to be rooming
up the roadwhere
a neighbor’s barn’dburned down.
The forecast had not predicted it,and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk
and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger
With a squeal, the alreadyotherworldly broadcaststuttered,scattered,leavingonly a tattered hiss.
If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not poetry? Quick, somebody tell Shakespeare.
Two VQR contributors are interviewed for “American Experience.”
Nothing to hosanna,you will be buried
Cold. Only the livinggo on living.
His face coming briefly into view
As the crowd pushes
Toward the subway entrance.
In its frame of light it faintly glows,like a projection screen […]
Whose name will be inscribed in the book just before mine?
His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spiritwith a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.
