There is no enough in exile.
I am accustomed to eventless days.
Funny thoughts slide into the head alone
on the interstate: I thought you were dead,
for example. Be kind to the body, stranger
that it is. Matter at odds with materialism:
I’m done perishing beneath weeping willows.
I need a salt lick, a fiefdom, a mylar balloon.
O to be nude and happy.
O to be Russian and asleep.
Carve me a wooden idol, already:
break my orbital, I mean occipital bone.
How to want what I can’t have all the time?
I’m tired of absence, and also of sameness.
The soul gets into the habit of its dreams.
Begging isn’t sexy, a friend reminds me.
But there is one kiss that never ends—
it lights up around your mouth.
Plausible god, god of rapture:
I am the dumb brute in the stable,
more idiot homewrecker than savant,
amorously wrecking my own shadow.
You are a shard of pulverized crystal,
the last known trace of Victoriana,
mercuric atom resigned to desire.
What human could stay so quiet?
One who is secretly on fire.
Virginia Konchan is the author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle; a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift; and four chapbooks, and is the co-editor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems. Her creative and critical work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
