they wanted to know if Etheridge Knight really went to jail and i said 
that's something we have to look up because my history is built 
by textbooks and curiosity but you can't be curious about a name you've 
never heard, in spite of majoring in English, studying poetry, and writing 
it for the last ten years and i am embarrassed by my whiteness and my 
ignorance and it is not too painful to tell them, because they know anyway, 
and they are kind about it. 

and so, yes, children, he did. Just like Malcolm and just like Martin
and just like i don't in spite of all the opportunities, because right 
now it's more important to get to you by 7:30 and anyway, who 
would post bail? 

i try not to cry, as much, anymore, because i haven't earned the tears
of other people's lives. i have only earned my own and God, and anyone 
around me, knows i've shed enough of those in the last four years 
to take my breaths in a jagged way that shakes my whole body and 
alarms the students and they say miss, did you forget to breathe again?

and what a question when yes maybe i did or maybe i held my
breath too long in order to feel the air press against my lungs when i was biting 
my lip and trying not to cry but i walk around free in a world where 
it is easier for me to breathe than it is for others 

when i saw her face it was on the beach in the summer and i was wearing 
a striped bikini and feeling good in my skin and then i saw her, smiling, 
not her mugshot, and by the time i saw her, she was dead and i didn't know 
what to do but shake and shudder and burn with anger under the sun
until my skin turned the color of the inside of my eyelids that did not burn
with tears because this was beyond that

i am still trying to find a language to speak but what is better is to listen and
i would like to believe i am ready for the revolution but the only reason i'm 
closer to being ready is because i know i am not and that i need a thousand 
more years of sitting at the feet of others to learn how to live as an interruption
to the heavy forked tongue that tells our history.

A student says in class:

there are two meanings to the word husband
the verb: to carefully use or manage

That night a student says to me in a dream:

I don't mind the dirt and I like the twists
but, I swear, this winding dirt road better
lead somewhere eventually

and we watch the camera pan out
and the road keeps going
through valleys and trees and fields
and there are mountains further off

we know
every road leads
somewhere eventually.

But sometimes I forget that
and it seems like all the streetlights
have turned to trees
and I am lost and there is snow in my beard
or in his and I mistake myself in dreams for a
man I used to know
and I am trying on men I don't know
and wearing their bruises
and it seems to make sense since I am 
32 and that is an age to begin to think about what
might be around the bend
and besides my ovaries hurt

but

i am further from home with men
who believe that I am lying
when I say I would rather be a very ancient
wall on which people write their secrets
than a mother or a thing that is easily
managed or used

what home but the road is there for a woman
who will not be had?