Virginia Konchan

TERRA NOVA

There is infinite space in the digital cloud,
yet no one can inhabit it.
It is cold and vacuous, like the moon.

If you disobey the higher laws, 
you then must obey the lower laws.
Pick your poison, as they say.

Hyperbole will not protect you 
against diminishing returns.

Elms exist, spite exists, birds exist.
What is a bird, but a handful 
of sinew and song?

Definitions terrify.
Distinctions frighten more. 
What do you mean, this is better than that? 
Is language a boa constrictor or a valve?

Oh so this is what a boundary is.  
Oh so this is what it means, to cop a feel.

I, too, divide light from darkness.
I, too, create animals of land and sea.

Why can’t it all be opera, heroine
dragging her voluminous dress
across the floor? Captive me.
Croon explicit lyrics in my ear.

I haven’t had a thought worth
thinking in three straight days,
and yet still you love me.

I might be a junkie,
and yet you draw ever near.
I don’t need proof of anything.

The only trial is by fire:
the only fear is fear.

VIRGINIA KONCHAN is the author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon); a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press); and four chapbooks. She is coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of the forthcoming Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press). Her creative and critical work has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.