Originally published in Woolfzine (2017)

Now Playing: Virginia Woolf by Robyn Hitchcock (I heard him do it live. Snaps.)

I wrote Looking for Virginia back in 2007 for a creative writing class. For a long time, I wasn’t sure what I’d made, only that it felt sharp and strange and necessary. No one saw it for years. Then, in 2017, I spotted the perfect home for it in Woolfzine, and I finally sent it out. They took it.

I remember writing it in one sitting, like I was being dictated to by some half-drunk literary ghost in a velvet coat. I still don’t know exactly what to call its form; it’s been accused of being everything from a poem to flash fiction to incantation. But when Word Raccoon insisted it deserved a second life, I listened. I’m still a little indignant I didn’t realize it had so much to say until later.

It was tempting to revise it, to hone it with my current skill level (which I hope is more nuanced now), but it’s such a perfect snapshot of who I was then that I just couldn’t touch it.

Virginia is one of the literary ghosts I will always be haunted by. I’m sorry neither Virginia nor Woolfzine survived.

Announcement, because I know some of you will notice: I usually refer to writers by their last names, regardless of gender, but I’ve written so much about Virginia Woolf that I feel I’ve earned the intimacy. So “Virginia” she remains.

Note of (maybe) interest. Last night the print of Vanessa Bell’s painting of her sister Virginia knitting fell off the stairwell wall. I don’t know if it was in protest of this post I was planning, or a reminder that I needed to get to it. Or maybe it was because, being out of picture wire, I decided zip ties were the next best thing. Which, obviously…(BTW, I mention knitting in my piece below. It’s a whole Virginia thing.)

Also, I just re-read Lady Lazarus recently and caught an unintended nod to Plath buried in here. It startled me, how unconscious influence loops back. Like Woolf, she’s in the air I breathe.

And, a more obvious nod goes the partial Emily Dickinson line. I probably didn’t even have to mention it to you word fiends, you would have ferreted it. Wait, Word Raccoon is tugging at me: raccooned it out.

Meanwhile, it’s all birthday central over here, my husband’s is tomorrow, and Word Raccoon has been asked to either hang some streamers or, for God’s sake, go sleep in the corner. I’ve also been refreshing Amazon like a Victorian heroine staring down the lane for a late telegram, hoping that last gift arrives in time.

Thanks for reading.

Looking for Virginia

“What are you looking for?”

I tip the bookshelf, leaking words onto the puddle of papers, papers, papers
that are all that hold me in this house.
Answers, answers he will never understand tinge my tongue.
“Virginia.”

Now he will dig and delve into the hallowed dalloways of my mind and.
He cannot.
He crabs my hands with his frigid old man no sympathy hands,
hairs on their sides like my stepbrother’s.
Stepbrothers.
Men with minds to hurt and hands to halt the
galloping growth of might haves.

“Leonard, don’t touch me.”
The icicle of me uvulas in the word winds.
Doctors voodoo a nothing for me.

They loose the mother inside me,
the sanity scrap bag;
knitting a shawl of should haves
I cover the mirror of beauty which is reality but not truth,
opened the door that ate my muse.

Mrs. Ramsey will not take it—
she dies for beauty.
Scarcely is she adjusted—
Leonard…did I write that?
No?

Words, my waifish children,
load empty hobo sacks onto heavy burdened backs
and don’t wave.
I sing them a lullaby of the crawdad, cavefish, cravefish.
Gravefish.

I wanted something once, didn’t I, Leonard?
Leonard?

I suck the soul from my sister and knit it to my own,
but it always goes home,
unknotted by her own lazy susan heart
that twirls in the direction of the man
with the predilection for a standing erection.

I children my pockets with stones,
write my memories goodbye and—
Leonard? Leonard?

No.
Just swim.
Go.