Virginia Konchan

Stone Age

Awash in a pool of superlatives,
we forget the finer disinctions
between things.  Look out
from whatever vantage
your living conditions afford:
see the generalizing angels
huddled over algebra,
shrubbery, dead forms.
Sunrise:  the hunt begins.
Sunset:  we pet our pelts,
retire.  Enough moralizing.
Enough faux-urgency.
Stanza, in Italian,
means room.
The cycle is all--
impeccable grammar
of the sun and the moon.

---

Discovery Channel

Levitating from the dead,
the color of butane,
the king-fisher forces his hand.
The elusive flower
reveals its stamen:
the rest is nature, ampersand.
The rest is the unwritten part
of the musical score.
Electric currents sing fa-la-la,
sing Il Trovatore.
We are a part of a rhythm nation,
a scientific revolution, a field.
Hive mind can't touch this:
the broken brain’s blather,
the seep of gold, the yield.

---

Vow

Grass seeks photosynthesis
like the mouth seeks 
a combination of vowels
and consonants, opiate
of language under duress, freefall.
I press the damper pedal down
on the key of F, the key of kindness,
until my foot becomes one with the ground.
I worship wind and reeds,
stuff of Orpheus' song.
I confuse the animal sunlight
making designs on the wood-beamed
floor with creatures anterior to name.
I die softly, celebrant fashioned,
or, rather, rough-hewn out of clay.
A god, too, needs goals.
I wake, prune my lemon-tree.
I call night night, day, day.




--
Virginia Konchan is the Author of Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets, The Believer, The New Republic, and Boston Review, and her fiction in StoryQuarterly, Memorious, and Joyland, among other places. Co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary, and Associate Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, Virginia currently work as an Executive Assistant for Sheep Meadow Press.