The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

There's a stone I had made for Luke at the top of the hill road, where the pasture opens wide and the setting sun highlights the words carved into its face. "That'll do, Luke, that'll do." The words are said to working dogs all over the world when the chores are done and the flock is settled: "That'll do dog, come home now, your work is done." Luke's work is done too. He took my heart and ran with it, and he's running still, fast and strong, a piece of my heart bound up with his, forever.

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.