These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

flight imagination order

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

puzzled grew

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

justice america firsts

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

novel walking writing

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

working-women

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

shoelaces feet writing

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

cutting roots sometimes

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

muse down-and writing

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

decline teaching struggle

Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

gender heterosexuality important

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

agency self might

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

mortality cancer scare

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

males guy people

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

males today way

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

groups feminist study

I was not - even the notion of "could not" seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

able brother running

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

pairs brother running

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

girlfriend taken brother

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

ongoing curiosity self

Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

growing-up catholic school