It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

I am this space my body believes in.

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.

Whoever said men hit harder when women are around, is right. Word for word, we beat the love out of each other.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.