Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.