Virginia Konchan is the author of five poetry collections, including Requiem (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Bel Canto, as well as a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. Coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, she holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Program for Writers. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Vespers

by Virginia Konchan

To seek to uncomplicate,
to make the unseen seen,
to receive but not consume:
if there is a higher order here,
news of which has not arrived.
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

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