Lesbian and bisexual literary icons whose words have healed and freed us…

Staceyann Chin

The truth is I’m afraid to draw your black lines around me.
I’m not always pale in the middle.
I come in too many flavors for one fucking spoon.
I am never one thing or the other.
At night I am everything I fear, tears and sorrows, black windows and muffled screams.
In the morning, I am all I ever want to be: rain and laughter,
bare footprints and invisible seams, always without breath or definition.
I claim every single dawn, for yesterday is simply what I was, and tomorrow even that will be gone.

— “Feminist or Womanist”

Becky Birtha

When you want very much
something that you can have
consider it a gift;
accept it gracefully.

— “Accept It Gracefully”

Sapphire

Two thousand miles away in the yellow
linoleum light of her kitchen, my mother
is sitting in the easy tan-colored man’s lap.
Kissing him. Her perfect legs golden like
whiskey, his white shirt rolled up arms
that surround her like the smell of cake baking.

“Forget about her,” my father’s voice drops like
a curtain, “she doesn’t want you. She never did.”

— “Breaking Karma #5″

Cherry Muhanji

Houses collect things: old newspapers, junk mail — Her. She had come under cover of night, a stowaway with Brother’s child tucked in the bottom of her belly . . . Brother’s house grew people: real cousins, arthritic aunts, nervous uncles, and Aunt Marion’s boy, the one with the ti-tongue. They had moved North, each trailing a dream from behind, like a peacock in mating season, in full color, from plantation to plant in one easy step.

— Her

Cheryl Clarke

poets are among the first witches
so suffer none to live or suffer none to be heard
and watch them burn before your eyes
less they recant and speak their verse
in latin.

— “wearing my cap backwards”

Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

— “Before you knew you owned it”

Octavia Butler

Alive! Still alive. Alive…again. Awakening was hard, as always. The ultimate disappointment. It was a struggle to take in enough air to drive off nightmare sensations of asphyxiation. Lilith Iyapo lay gasping, shaking with the force of her effort. Her heart beat too fast, too loud. She curled around it, fetal, helpless. Circulation began to return to her arms and legs in flurries of minute, exquisite pains.

— Dawn

June Jordan

At the throat of Soweto
a devil language falls
slashing
claw syllables to shred and leave
raw
the tongue of the young
girl
learning to sing
her own name.

— “A Song for Soweto”

Audre Lorde

I dream of a place between your breasts
to build my house like a haven
where I plant crops
in your body
an endless harvest
where the commonest rock
is moonstone and ebony opal
giving milk to all of my hungers
and your night comes down upon me
like a nurturing rain.

— “Woman”

And the list and legacy goes on…

Who are your literary icons?