 In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and emissions became strongly etched in the merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid to question or to speak as I believed. Could have meant pain or death, but we all hurt in so many different ways all the time and pain will either change or end. Death on the other hand is the final silence and that might be coming quickly now without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said or had only betrayed myself into small silences. While I planned some day to speak or waited for somebody else's words and I began to recognize a source of power within myself that came from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into perspective gave me great strength. This quote is from Audre Lorde's essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action where she talks about her responsibility as a writer in the face of cancer. In coming in contact with death, she was called to prioritize her own self-revelation. That revelation is a necessary action to know ourselves and to illuminate the power of our shared experiences with others. Through her writing she created a lineage, a history, and what is history but a stream where we find ourselves within but also as a stream, the moved and the mover. This history extends beyond us, within us it moves and waves. I began this process by reading Sister Love, a book of personal letters between Audre Lorde and Pat Parker spanning from 1974 to 1989 immersing myself in the 15 years of their private correspondences about writing, getting paid, their partners, their children, and struggling with cancer. I was struck by how a process so intimate is also the ground for culture. Their letter showed me how the world with this violence permeates our lives and psyches but also that our psyches, our most acute dreams and tensions reshape the world and create history. In her letter to Audre Lorde, Pat Parker writes, Now you realize I am getting myself more frustrated. If I can fully accept my theory that anger is the primary cause of my having cancer then I must look around me and make assessment. Why am I angry? Who am I angry at? And what can I do to change it? And of course the minute I start thinking along this vein I get even more angry. From the monumental thought of overthrowing the system and reading my life of capitalism, racism, sexism, classism to the smallest nuisance of getting Marty to put the toilet paper on the spool with the sheets unfolding outward there is simply too much for me to handle. A half full, she says. Didn't I tell you to build up support and learn to depend on people? Audre Lorde responds, Bullshit. It is our anger that causes our... Bullshit on, it's our anger that causes our cancer. How much stromium 90 and racism have you absorbed today? I feel it's my anger that has helped keep me alive and what the hell are we even supposed to erect against their homophobic racist sexist poison? A submissive grin? We were never meant to survive so under the circumstances, girlfriend I think we've done pretty well, give or take it that spell or two. Neither one of us is lying in the gutter gutted with no mind to be elsewhere, no work to do and no one caring and each of us could have been there and you know it and I know it so let's not kid ourselves. To know a poet through their writing and to be able to hear perhaps their most profound feelings and thoughts and to know that their experiences and sensations arise from bodies that are queer and black and struggling with illness, how both love and rage are centrally stationed in the bodies of queer black women and see that intimacy with the self be translated into words whereby I recognize that same anger and love within myself. Rage is the illumination by which we know our lives. Through this rage, which is also love, we rename ourselves, revealing a narrative that is apparent but must be brought to the surface. Through turning silence into language and action, our bodies respond to and produce culture as we draw upon the wells of sensation deep within ourselves and reflect, agitate and move the world around us, how culture is a well within our own bodies expressing dreams to the waking world. People tend to talk about writing as if it only takes place in the mind as if it is aloof and intellectual, not acknowledging the ways that honesty shocks and reverberates in our voices and hands and swallowed whole by listeners. These are the gifts of queer black women poets who came before us, the gifts that solidify into history, the alchemical power of writing whereby we take our most wounded experiences and transform them into a space of refuge for ourselves and the pieces of ourselves and others. This process of undoing the narrative violently put on us and naming our lives through our own voices and sensations. Pat Parker writes in her poem Liberation Fronts, Had I listened to my father, I would be married and miserable, dreaming of fish in open space, bellowing my needs, waiting for somebody to listen to the second run and know. It is difficult to be strong and appear sure. No one ever believes you when you cry. Parker shows us how she resisted the narratives of how her life should be, knowing the emptiness that waited for her if she chose dishonesty. This is what took place in her life, but also the poem itself is a revelation, a metacognition of the tension that results from choosing to live in truth. The honesty of poetry draws from the mystery within us, dissolves the violent narrative placed on our bodies and creates refuge, recreating the way we know ourselves and relate to others. In this way, writing and loving have similar functions where creation and entropy act in unison and we destroy the concepts which entrap us, replacing them with new platforms of awareness and engagement to go deep into the opaque world of sensation and return with new names for ourselves. We create our own myths, the cell chemical process of using our bodies to create refuge through poetry with the brilliance and enormity to which we have access. The process by which we transform wounds into places where we find ourselves resilient and vocal, these wounds and our full responses to them, the desire to heal and recognize wholeness. Through these particularities of our existence, we find ourselves in the larger constellations of life. They're moving deeply into our stories and allowing our history to illuminate our humanity, that our humanity is deeply entrenched in the ways we love and fight, that we care for ourselves in relation to others.