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.
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
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.
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?