Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.