Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.