This is a poem that I submitted to the Agnes Scott College Writers Festival Contest in 2019. It was published in the 2020 Writers Festival Magazine.
Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, Burley House, 1913
Lysol. Old lint. Sterile doorknobs.
I’ll be here, in this corner, licking the smell of madness from my wounds, forever.
I hang immobile, suspended
in air halfway between insanity
and moonlight, listening to the
step-steps of the woman who will
take my dulled pencils away from
me.
I don’t tell her I can’t eat before I’ve cleared my stomach of words.
Eat speak nap breathe. What a weight it
is to forgive the pain for slowly
killing you. I reach for my scalp
and feel it smoldering still. The
person who’s abused me
slowly, unphysically,
since my twelfth lifetime, gifts me
tulips which promptly
die.
Held by gravity in a field
between remembering and dismembering,
I place my pencils on my tongue
and
bite.
