A Perfect Circle Rimmed With Gold

Abstract

In Virginia Woolf’s essay on the Victorian phantom known as the Angel in the House (borrowed from Coventry Patmore’s poem celebrating domestic bliss) she wrote, “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.” A Perfect Circle Rimmed With Gold is a long-form poem that addresses the question of how a woman may not kill the many spirits haunting her domestic space, but reconcile and learn from them through love and hospitality. In a series of vignettes revolving around a dinner party meets séance, the Hostess and her Beloved entertain a series of former lovers in the form of unruly, sometimes drunken ghosts. Examinations of our relationship to rituals and to our own past are put into parallel. A spirit board communicates and interjects throughout, eventually taking over the gathering to speak as a Greek chorus between courses. Sacrificial spiders lurk in corners of a great reckoning. It is an exorcism as an attempt to love—unabashedly and completely. A Perfect Circle plays upon images of hauntings, bodies, ritual, food, and all of the associations those things have within ourselves as human beings.