I’m pulled toward a place where the stars shine more brightly and the river bends this way then that. I’m pulled toward the bright bakery where a group of sixty- and seventy-somethings meets for coffee while next door the plant-filled restaurant waits to open its doors for the lunch crowd…

We traveled together, we who wanted to know, found the cave of belonging in the elevations that hold the beginning of time. And when we approached, the glow from a fire that has burned through plagues and plunder pulled us into its light and our hands reached for each other’s and we circled the answer of What Women Are Made Of: explosions that scattered star stuff, the cool stone of moons, longitudes and latitudes, mapped and uncharted,

we carry the weight of the world bearers of water, of custom, of men our creative powers shine in the eyes of the young and we divine songs to heal the sorrows born by gain we teach ourselves to gather the dirty laundry soak it in vats of forgiveness we speak when the occasion demands or sit silent or wail we arrive to each morning ready again to hold the world together with soapy water and a drying towel

The Personal is Political. Post 5. For years, Daddy had on alternating Saturdays taken his girls to the segregated Carnegie Library in Clarksdale. One such day early in the summer after I had turned thirteen. I broke away from Daddy and my sister and skipped my way to the basement staircase…

The Personal is Political, Post 4 — On weeknights as Momma sat glued to the image of Walter Cronkite on the national TV news, I adopted the habit of pacing. I worried Daddy home with my waiting by the window and appealed to the God of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to keep him safe. …

The Personal is Political, Post 3 — In the middle of my second-grade year, after eighteen months in Jackson, Daddy announced around the kitchen table that he received another transfer. I shot a glance at Momma and my belly went squishy. What about school? I wondered. I loved my teacher, who put me in the blue bird reading group…

The Personal is Political, Post 2 — By the time our family arrived in Jackson, the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education, which established that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, had been ignored in Mississippi for ten long years. As a six-year-old, I had no idea. Just as Momma and Daddy…

The Personal is Political series, Post 1 — During the summer of 1963, six months before the assassination of President Kennedy, Medgar Evers, a Black Mississippian, was murdered in Jackson just days after he assisted several young Black activists with an attempt to attend the two biggest churches in Jackson, First Baptist and Galloway Methodist. …

I’m discovering the writer, the one who wakes early to read again the paragraphs from the day before, to see what’s gone missing, to learn if the spirits still live in those lassoed symbols, those syllabled sounds. I’m discovering the writer, the one who sees a poem in the soapy…