No uniformly positive coefficient in a zero-boundary Sobolev space

On a nonempty bounded domain where the Poincare inequality holds, no $a\in H_0^1(\Omega )$ can satisfy $a\ge a_{-}>0$ almost everywhere. For $g(s)=\min (\max (s,0),a_{-})$, Lipschitz truncation preserves zero-boundary Sobolev spaces, so $g(a)\in H_0^1(\Omega )$. But $g(a)$ would be the nonzero constant $a_{-}$, whose zero gradient contradicts the Poincare inequality. In a uniformly elliptic divergence-form elliptic operator, the homogeneous boundary condition belongs to the unknown and test functions, not to a coefficient bounded below by a positive constant.