Bio

Victoria Lau holds an MFA degree from Lindenwood University. She was the 3rd place poetry winner for the Random House Creative Writing Competition in 2013. Her poems have been published in Rogue Agent, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, and elsewhere. She was also the 1st place winner for the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize in 2020. She was a poetry reader for GASHER Journal and is one of the marketing coordinators for The Adroit Journal. She has taught poetry at Sadie Nash Summer Institute. She is a writing assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College Writing Center and an English adjunct lecturer at Queens College and John Jay. Follow her IG: victoria.lau_calliope_poet.

Old
Maid,
since your
last courtship
dance was many springs
ago, your looks can't be dowered
anymore; your caste worth: to spin wool over a loom.
Fate hasn't dowered you with the gift to weave poetry, so bury your dreams in a tomb.

On
the
eve of
your birthday,
you'll prick your finger
on the spindle of a spinning
wheel, and like your dreams, you'll fall down and die an old maid.
So go wed Old Jenny, and use her distaff, your love toy, to spin tales of the made maid.¹

The
moon
once pulled
blood from you,
now pulls silver threads²
from your head, a spider's navel.
You cower in your cowardice blood fearing the day
Fate would cut your life's thread and weave a crewelwork web of your failures and idleness.

You
will
never
compete with
the academic
gods, you'll never be a real
professor. Your mortality hanging by a thread
with a noose at the end, spider veins around your neck; your myth is your Achilles' heel.

¹ "Made Maid" is a term coined by Anne Stevenson in her poem, "The Ballad of the Made Maid."
² Inspired by A.E. Stallings' Arachne Gives Thanks to Athena: "The moon once pulled blood
from me. Now I pull silver./Here are the lines I pulled from my own belly" (lines 10-11).