2 POEMS BY VIRGINIA CONN

Virginia is currently taking a break from a master's degree at the University at Buffalo because her "research proved more interesting than [her] thesis."  Contact her at ginnpoet@yahoo.com 

Picture Daddy dead


He buzzed their house on base

and got busted down a rank

my mother said


so I think of him, in Vietnam

buzzing some other woman's hut

flushing her out into the open.


Them in paddies, waiting.


Second pass, skimming trees

small arms raise

firing, bloodying his nose

puncturing his tin side

rupturing his full tanks.

Ablaze, he spirals down, ejecting


from the cockpit photo

to the hardwood floor under

the mantel where the frame

always stood.  All ever I knew of him.

A hamster-like death, six weeks

rotting in the baseboards.




Moore's woman

after Henry Moore's "Woman in the underground"

Moore's woman in the underground

is tightly wound, sits seemingly calm

though pensive fingers on her right

pick quarrels with her own left hand.


She is not so much speechless as

without a mouth, just as the painting

trails off without giving her feet-

never mind, she is going nowhere.


Moore's woman of the underground

is bound to the frame, the self

tightly raveled, & no train of thought

compels, that sits so still, so rapt-


Footnotes to the work allude to war

to others huddled, bundled as she,

but it's all romance, an anywoman

to serve until an ALL CLEAR sounds.


She is a construct, conscripted without

feet to run, those querulous hands!

and no mouth to object to the fight,

no eyes to find her way out, to daylight.


It is the war we're meant to decry

a faceless helpless woman to rally round

our heartstrings as tightly wound

about this woman in the underground.


But what I know of war makes me

impatient with these ties that bind

this woman to the underground.

I want to take an end & pull.


Copyright Virginia Conn