Hey Virginia

Get this:
Chloe still likes Olivia
Chloe loves Olivia.

Chloe proposed to Olivia
right there
in the laboratory.

Chloe and Olivia
are getting married.

Everyone’s invited.
Come back, come back,
Virginia, just for this one day.

Where’s the Frozen River?

I sit beneath a painting of Kerouac
in thick shades
of gray and try to digest

the fact that I am older than he
will ever be. I should
be so privileged to pass

Emily and Virginia. I’ll prefer
mine lilac and thinner
than the rim of ice

hovering along these northern banks
of the Mississippi. This January
moves unnaturally fast.

“How describe the world seen without a self?”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Enter this garden
of obsession. Edge growth
out to fill beds

with worry
stones. Ease your way
from grimaces to oval

reflection pools. Exit
through this iron gate
to a new order where

you might begin to see how
there could be a world

without the self.