Poetry

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched
the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh
through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]

At the lower fence line under the stars
he hears what at first he takes
to be the neighbor’s mare come
to investigate his apple pocket […]

Ruin

was rumored

to be rooming

up the road
where

a neighbor’s barn’d
burned 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 already
otherworldly broadcast
stuttered,
scattered,
leaving
only 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 living
go on living.