Poetry / Virginia Konchan
:: Lamentation ::
Please take a moment to fill out these forms. Six hours later, yes, the forms have been filled. I’ve drunk the bitter cup, eaten bread of sorrow, lived to know that work is bad for your health. The paperwork enshrouding it, the routine bills and insurance premiums justifying it, like a kick in the teeth of a thoroughly benumbed stud horse, whose only value is to generate seed, as decreed. Expecting someone from the slacker generation to work 60-hour weeks and be delighted about it is an unwholesome delusion in need of crushing. Wealth as having an extra bag of boiled rice is a measure of economic progress I long to surpass. Am I more than the sum of every high and low? Will He who smote great nations, slew mighty kings, majestically vanquish my enemies, too? Other than a couple awkward hugs, I have not been touched in years. Forgive me, my body has not been touched in years, thanks to the invisible fencing I professionally installed, otherwise known as an energetic boundary. Words make or break us: bring peace, war. I hold my phone like it’s a chalice or vessel, when really it’s just a phone. What portent, what auspicious omen do I expect to come, funnelling through electromagnetic smog? Gadgets jockey for my precious attention, already subdivided like a federal territory. Giants fall, mountains move, waters part: no further proof is needed of God, I see. I click to insert my signature, whereof I’m glad: thou hast dealt bountifully with me.
:: Anemone ::
The white anemone is a cruel gift, Father. A perennial, it’s born to die, and not return. Anemone, Greek for “daughter of the wind.” Something must have happened to the mother, stewards of the earth say, when seeing a litter of kittens, bunnies, squirrels, or baby birds fallen from the sky. We mimic her motions, her fastidious hovering, maternal diligence, hoping abandoned fledglings might survive. My sister wound a plastic flower at the foot of my mother’s hospice bed, to bring cheer. I adjusted the curtains: is it too much light? Not enough? She stared at and through me, unable to have or articulate her preference. Instead, I spoke, because she could hear. In heaven, nothing changes, save for the concealing and magnifying of presence. I can picture it, a bucolic pastoral scene: shepherdess herding cows by your side. Yet with a single turn of fortune’s wheel I found myself impersonal and asexual: no known next-of-kin, no cause or cure. I don’t steal, I don’t harm or hit anyone. I routinely act irrespective of how I feel. For what am I preparing: my own death? Forgive me, please, for misrecognition, for preferring to stand alone in a field. I thought to save you by saving myself, which I know is the saddest departing. The more I become myself, the more I betray the world.
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Lamentation” and “Anemone” are included in my forthcoming poetry collection Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church’s canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. “Lamentation” constellates grief into anger towards techno-bureaucratic ideology and the depredations of corporate culture, ongoing through a harrowing loss, and a cri de coeur to a salvific god. “Anemone,” inspired by Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, is a meditation on mortality and the struggle to continue living while caring for my mother in hospice for close to two years. In those years, she had no motor function and limited cognitive function, and these poems became a way for me to speak back to the grief (anticipatory and real, after she passed away in December 2023), as well as the feeling that I had become not only her caregiver but also an interpreter of her agency and desires, no longer communicated in verbal or written language but rather the language of the heart.
Virginia Konchan is the author of five poetry collections, including Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), and Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022). Coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), and recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Residency and the National Endowment for the Humanities, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and the Academy of American Poets.