In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Strangers are an endangered species.

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.