Teaching Virginia Woolf
By Carlie Hoffman
It was October. An unseasonably warm day. I know because I was wearing shoes without socks. Near the campus of John F. Kennedy High School, the stray geese crowded on the brown grass by the traffic circle, like groupies as if the honking horns of the cars were a rock band. Across from the bleachers, a chain-link fence separated the parking lot from the football field where rust-colored leaves collected at the metal base. The concession stand’s white paint was chipped. A girl with curly red hair wearing a red T-shirt bought a bag of chips. Keith, my high school crush and sister’s boyfriend, waves to me. I haven’t spoken to him since the weekend before when the three of us went apple picking. In the orchard, my sister threw an apple at me, and Keith laughed. I was just beginning freshman year. I signed up for the swim team, practicing the butterfly and freestyle and learning to dive less crooked, which was going well. My sister went to the kinds of parties where all the boys wore tight jeans and played in garage bands. The world can be the saddest fish tank.
That night, in the downstairs’ television room connected to the patio, I was watching Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. The documentary was about three teenagers who were tried for the murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas. I had never been to Arkansas. I thought there was only a Memphis in Tennessee, which I had never been to either. Suddenly my sister clicked the screen door shut behind her, reeking of weed. Her mascara was smudged under her eyes. Her shirt was buttoned wrong. She either got dressed in a hurry or she was too stoned to notice. Standing in front of the mirror above the fireplace, she plucked a dead leaf from her hair, dropped it into the bowl of potpourri on the mantle, and asked me, “Have you ever had sex?”
I thought about the girl at camp that summer who let two boys finger her while they swam in the lake, and I said, “Yes.”
“With who?”
“Andrew.”
Andrew sat next to me on the bus ride home from swim practice that week. My friend Becca said he had a crush on me, and then she faked gagging.
My sister stopped looking at herself. She was looking at the television. “Keith has a tattoo down there. A small dinosaur. You have to look really closely to see what it is.” Then she went upstairs.
Later in bed with my hand inside my underpants, I thought about the dinosaur.
***
It is October. The professor is feeling around in her purse for the keys. The student is still there. Another earnest student going on about Virginia Woolf
“I only knew about moths from my grandmother’s attic,” she says, “but the moth is a metaphor for life. I’m thinking I’ll write a series of poems about moths.”
“That’s lovely.” The professor, standing up, shuts off the lights to her office.
***
I believed dead girls lived eternally as trees and on bad-weather nights their leaves fly into the gutters, choking the rain pipes.
About the Author:
Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator from the German of Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Carlie’s honors include the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review poetry prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Loose Translation Award, and fellowships from Columbia University and the City University of New York and her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents and other publications. Carlie lives in Brooklyn, where she edits Small Orange Journal. She has taught at Columbia University and NYU and is a Lecturer of creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase. Her third poetry collection is forthcoming in 2025.
