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Valediction
Virginia Konchon | Poetry
Today is all we have. Today was also all we had
yesterday, and will be all we have yet tomorrow.
How are we supposed to sleep at night, save for
the utter exhaustion of our biodegradable forms?
There are philosophies of coming and going to
engage in, without actually moving your body.
There are economies and expenditures of being
to ponder: semiotics of to give it up, lend an ear.
So too with metaphors, symbolic representations
such as doors. While the main purpose of a door
is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.
Will there be time to contemplate the grammar
of eternity in eternity? Are transhumanist and
Buddhist dreams of pure consciousness akin?
Last night, upon seeing my mother in hospice
for the first time in over a week, I crawled into
her bed and sobbed: a reality reality can’t touch.
My father stood beside the bed, blessed likewise
by the gift of tears, the gift of death, the gift of
knowing that all knowing leads to unknowing.
I touched her skull, raised in parts by a shunt—
implanted to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid
from her brain—feeling her form like Braille.
There is grief, then there are theories of grief.
Also subjects, authored by an author of days.
I have spent my life on a thousand mindless,
inconsequential introductions, echo of hellos.
One day soon I will say goodbye to language
so she can ascend to an alternative universe
called heaven where there is no need of it:
where she is at peace, and perfectly loved.
Virginia Konchan is the author of five books of poetry, including Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025) and Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), and a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. 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 Poet Residency Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Believer, and the Academy of American Poets.