Nudes

Lone Woolf

Nude #1: A Room

I wake up in a room
that isn’t mine.
There is a book on the table

so I open her up.
As I turn the pages, it appears.
I stare at a page of words

that look exactly like me:
full of creases
and coffee stains.

It is a letter written to my soul in 1929.
It almost flows waves out and engulf me
And I realize she killed me and only Shakespeare is left.

All because I did not have a room of my own.
But I am not dead –
And still, I do not have what is essential:

a room of one’s own.
So I wonder,
will I die tonight?

Nude #2: Lover

You are old until I melt backwards through time,
until I look in the mirror
and see my eyes are yours.

My face is unrecognizable, a ripple in the mirror,
but I know that deep release of heat under my skin
when I think of her,

the way you did when you imagined Orlando.
I know you did this to me,
back when I read your letters to Vita.

You planted a marble of truth
that sprouted with inevitability.
I know that if she asked me to write her a story,

I would wish to invent Orlando for her, too:
Unending time
and unending genders.

Nude #3: Classroom

I am wide awake in a women’s studies class.
I am so confused because everyone is calling me a feminist,
and I scream, “My name is Virginia Woolf!”

I can’t take it anymore, this world.
Carrying these weights like fuel,
I eat them into my stomach fire.

The oppression builds and builds and builds,
like steam with nowhere to escape,
I know I will blow.

This is what it feels like when female is irrelevant.
The world just keeps reproducing
the same prejudice over and over and over.