We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so...

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male “fear of women” and of women’s sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men...

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.

The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain...

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or...

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin —for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we...

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g,...

Life on the planet is born of woman.

And yet, protest it if we will,Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch upon those starry skeinsAnd drives us out of doors at nightTo gaze at anagrams of light.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence–...

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

A year, ten years from now, I’ll remember this; not why, only that we were here like this, together.

Love, our subject:we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.

I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and...

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the...

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied...

The moment of change is the only poem.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer’s block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above...

The moment of change is the only poem

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his...

The word ”revolution” itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the ”revolution” of a wheel which returns in the end to the same...

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic...

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which...

It’s as though she was able to convert her rage to live under this verdict of HIV into an art that was actually equal to it.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break...

Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of...

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might...