Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

There are no honest poems about dead women.

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

Without community, there is no liberation.

Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .