National Poetry Month : Virginia Konchan,

 

Schist    

 

 

I don’t attract what I want, but rather what I am:
schist, a medium-grade metamorphic rock formed
from mudstone or shale, with flat, sheet-like grains
in a preferred orientation, often finely interleaved
with feldspar and quartz.  Yes, I might produce
literature out of this conflict in my being, but
more likely is an ahistorical, silent trance.
I have lived long enough to see anecdotes
become statistics, like that line in the song
“A Little Fall of Rain” in Les Miserables,
when Éponine, bleeding to death from a
gunshot wound she took to save Marius,
says to him, in his arms:  “Don’t you fret,
Monsieur Marius, I don’t feel any pain.”
Just a dull clot on the stem of my brain,
symbolic of character types redeemed.
Who’s to say:  the general economy?
Swear on a holy book, curse me or turn:
I respect the rules of this establishment.
Ask any crystalline, tetrahedron form
how to value money, they’ll answer—
far better to last, than to burn. 

 

 

 

Author of three poetry collections, Hallelujah Time (Véhicule Press, 2021), Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2020 and 2018); 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 work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Believer.

National Poetry Month : Cecilia Stuart,

 

[untitled]

 

I: LOOKING AT THE WORLD THROUGH A BAR OF BLUE SOAP

I’ve decided to stop rotting. Each day begets another hour skewed. I’ve been here, turned, bolted, ended up exactly where I was before.

I ask the earth for a hibiscus bush. I watch her all day from across the street. When I sit down to write her name, I can only manage a letter or two.

II: BUZZED

It’s April. I am one day older, picking snails up from the garden. When they shrink I put them down. Everybody drinks vermouth but me.

It’s April with a split sky. I track mud from room to room. I feign a sense of ending, driving home to Islands in the Stream.

III: READING ELENA FERRANTE

Elena Ferrante writes “from general disintegration, new composition.” Every day I wake up sweating and spend hours staring at my phone.

IV: CHRISTINE

On this fifth day it’s all I can do: knit fabric, shake with rage, eat an olive, forget you.

Every night a woman wakes, packs a bag. She gets into the car and waits. Every night someone brings her back inside.

There is always something to fold. There are coins and/I always trace my way back to the person I left roadside, staring at the purplish clouds on the horizon.

Her gaze stacks bits of copper one by one. then they evaporate.

V: HIBISCUS BUSH

Some parts of me are carrying: some parts are wrapped in wool.

Some parts of me are still at Shoppers Drug Mart. But when I look at you I feel it in the loudest part of me.

So don’t call this a trick.

VI: THE PASSAGE OF TIME

I practice saying EVERY DAY YOU HELD ME BY THE ANKLES. Years from now will I recall the sobs lodged in your chest? The nights we spent at Ted’s? Or the cab ride to the airport, so wildly overpriced? These pile-ups take dates with just one letter: E

VII: OPTIMIZING

I have held these pieces close to me. I have laid them bedside as I slept. But today you are a Portent for one who will dissolve me. I’ll take yellow roads or hills and dig up roots clung deep. She says omens only come around on even-numbered days.

 

 

 

Cecilia Stuart is the author of the chapbooks HOUNDS (above/ground 2020) and Mudroom (Anchorage 2018, with photography by Adrian Kiva). Her poems have appeared in Plenitude, PRISM international, the Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Toronto.