B is for blamelessness, Sherlock’s whodunit
hook keeping bee-hived housewives propped
up on one elbow past midnight, while their
husbands, laid-off from the plastic plant,
snore steadily on. B is for boring holes
into drywall in a modular, pre-fab home,
the blasphemy of Cold War shelter—
as if a bomb could destroy language,
our belief in babies, bile, bric-brac,
and the helium balloon, now punctured,
of speculative financiers, cartoonish
voice-over whiting out, for decades,
the warp and woof of world.

Dolores Hazes Unwraps a Little Debbie

When alone, Brahms’
A German Requiem
seeping through the slats
on the floor,  I resist
the bathetic urge
to indulge my childhood
comfort of choice, left,
like a row of junk heirlooms
by my wire monkey mother
on the Formica window sill.
Smoothing my pageboy,
I leave (Charlotte
bent over a roast),
join the steady
footfall of the
liberation army
I once confused
(amid factory-
produced sugar
spires) with you.  

Virginia Konchan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets 2011, the Believer, Boston Review, and Sixth Finch.  Recent projects include a new literary journal of poetry and political commentary, Matter.