A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

To do something very common, in my own way.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.