It is a pity it is evening, Li Po:
would that we could all sit,
cracking brazil nuts and
muckracking with the moon.
And yet look! The supinated
limbs of factory laborers, sewing
buttons onto starched shirts until
nimble fingers bleed, reattach
to wrists, arms, then torsos:
sensations stir, a cool breeze.
Tell a dream, lose a reader:
how else to explain Daphne’s
rebellion from the god of
sex: rights reverting, after
the production of desire,
to you, and me, and trees.
Virginia Konchan‘s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, the Believer, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, and her criticism in Boston Review, Quarterly Conversation, Barzakh Magazine, and elsewhere. Co-founder of Matter, a literary journal of political poetry and commentary, she lives in Chicago.