I Am Virginia (Edited)

I Am Virginia

Nude #1: A Room

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

that looks exactly like me,
creases and coffee stains,
written in 1929.

I unfold through the past life truths
that I’ve repressed,
thanks to modern day preservatives.

I understand now
that my gender was murdered,
for not having a room of my own.

It’s 2011, and I still don’t have
a room.
History repeats.

Nude #2: Lover

I save love letters in my dresser
from a woman a hundred years older than me.
When I open the envelopes, words pour out,

sprout wings and soar.
Coffee spills can be wiped up,
but words move too quickly for paper towels.

I pluck words from the air.
One by one, they whisper promises.
My temperature quickly swells.

Words wrap around my body,
rubbing against me in spaces
words have never filled.

I bend female, I bend male,
I can’t tell where I end
and Orlando begins.

An anachronistic genderfuck:
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.