“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.”

“Wherever in this city, screens flickerwith pornography, with science-fiction vampires,victimized hirelings bending to the lash,we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walkthrough the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid crueltiesof our own neighborhoods.We need to grasp our lives inseperablefrom those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,and the red begonia perilously flashingfrom a tenement sill six stories high,or the long-legged young girls playing ballin the junior highschool playground.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.”

“One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.”

“FINAL NOTATIONSit will not be simple, it will not be longit will take little time, it will take all your thoughtit will take all your heart, it will take all your breathit will be short, it will not be simpleit will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heartit will not be long, it will occupy your thoughtas a city is occupied, as a bed is occupiedit will take all your flesh, it will not be simpleyou are coming into us who cannot withstand youyou are coming into us who never wanted to withstand youyou are taking parts of us into places never plannedyou are going far away with pieces of our livesit will be short, it will take all your breathit will not be simple, it will become your will”

“Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.”

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.”

“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 isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)”