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You are here: Home / Poetry / Epithalamium

Epithalamium

Poetry by Virginia Konchan

I ask you to help me move
the cadaver: you demure.
I ask you to help me conjugate
French verbs: you aver.
I ask you for the sun & moon,

to rewrite the dictionary,
to decolonize modern love.
I ask your help in coming
of age, with middle age,
with contractions

and police records.
I ask you to preserve me
from officialdom, to
wait for hours while
I paint my face and set my hair.

I want the pure thought, unchained,
smallest units of language
conspiring to become other
as they balance, like
molecules of air.

 

 

Virginia Konchan is the author of a collection of poetry, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2017).

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Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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