Virginia Konchan

The Red Kerchief

Lightning zigzags across a starlit sky,

but I am stone cold, no, colder

than stone. My Paleolithic heart

blooms through the blackness

of attire. I am dressed for market,

to buy items for our brood.

You see me as if through glass;

it is the face, now aged, you once

cradled and adored. The poplar parts,

revealing the sapling of a poplar,

dendritic diagram.  It is winter:

has been, will be. 

I am not appeased by the mere

suggestion of movement, reality.

           

Virginia Konchan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets 2011, The Believer, and The New Republic, among other places. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, she lives in Chicago, where she is a PhD student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.