Writing as a woman means writing as a part of the continuance—through silence, through burning, to and from foreverness—making lines on a page. Making one line and then turning and making another, one line after the next, as a plough turns a field,
1972 • Veteran’s Day. Our grandmother calls it Armistice, Remembrance. Six cousins propped on pillows for the annual screening of The Wizard of Oz. Technicolor poppies over Flanders Fields. Blood-soaked opium. What one country did to another, what the Old World did to the New: massacre. Poppies are the California state flower.
See AS, as in something working as something else: words as nails, the sounds of words as hammers, compositions as collections that do something really do something to us.
Fifty years ago, two baby girls were born on the same August day in a Los Angeles hospital, just a few miles north of where their native city smoldered under the painful violence of racial injustice.