Nothing sings so sweetly as silence.
My shadow lies atop your shadow,
eclipsing each letter I write.
After torture, moonlight.
After moonlight, grief.
There is no word for vanishing
in the language I painstakingly learn.
Samsara, satori, hyperreal simulacra:
I had a raison d’être, but gave it away.
For you, I sat under a yew tree’s shade
for a thousand years and did not twitch:
I ate only lemons amid a welter of fruit.
Love and hate are ordinary amalgams:
the real mystery is bequeath and bereft.
To a happy phantom wed, until parted
upon death. Here is my living hand,
digits curled into a posthumous fist.
Enter the amphitheater with me:
to the usher, call me wife.
Hidden star, awaken me:
give me back my life.
Author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018 and 2020); a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and four chapbooks, as well as coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2022), Virginia Konchan’s creative and critical work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
Photo by chrisotruro on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA