Afraid is a country with no exit visas...
I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing...
There are no honest poems about dead women.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.
I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
You’d better name yourself, because, if you don’t others will do it for you.
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.
Women on trains have a life that is exactly livable the precision of days flashing past.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Poetry is not a luxury.
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.