F*ck Yeah, Adrienne Rich!

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.     The accidents happen,

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

poetry means refusing the choice to kill or die

You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.

…you look at me like an emergency.

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters / The beak that grips her, she becomes.

You’ve kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone… and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

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

To speak to another human becomes a risk

Profound skepticism, caution, and righteous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman’s response to the woman-hatred embedded in male-dominated culture, to the forms assumed by ‘normal’ male sexuality, and to the failure even of 'sensitive’ or 'political’ men to perceive or find these troubling.  Yet woman-hatred is so embedded in culture, so 'normal’ does it seem, so profoundly is it neglected as a social phenomenon, that many women, even feminists and lesbians, fail to identify it until it takes, in their own lives, some permanently unmistakeable and shattering form.