Of course.
I was going to, you know.
Or maybe you didn’t.
Already my mouth
gone soft when you
kissed me goodnight
and let me go.
It would’ve been easy.
I could’ve claimed
I was afraid of the dark.
I am, you know.
Afraid I mean.
-Sandra Cisneros, from Why I Didn’t

and it seemed like dancing
as when we angels
praise among the clouds
but they were not praising You
-Lucille Clifton

Us lay with our arms round each other. Sometimes Shug read the paper out loud. The news always sound crazy. People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.
-Alice Walker, from The Color Purple

How beautiful you are
like the color inside an ear
like a conch shell
like a Modigliani nude
-Sandra Cisneros, from Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity

In dreams the origami of the brain
opens like a fist, a pomegranate,
an expensive geometry.
-Sandra Cisneros, from Night Madness Poem

Choose your weapon.
Mine–the telephone, my tongue.
Both black as a gun.
-Sandra Cisneros, from Night Madness Poem

Damn these damn
hours between me,
you. Cities and deserts
and hours and hours that widen
like dreams. And dreams that narrow
like bridges. And seconds
endless as all of Texas
lethargic and thick
under the dogday heat.
-Sandra Cisneros, En Route to My Lover I Am Detained by Too Many Cities and Human Frailty

…and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.
-Lucille Clifton, from the death of fred clifton