My Life in Hiding is one of five full-length poetry collections that were published together as a single volume in Quarterly Review of Literature: Poetry Series, Volume XXX. The poems set daily, domestic experience against the background of history and politics, adopting the drama of repression, deprivation, revolution, and liberation as metaphor for the emotional life. The title poem was inspired by the emergence of the political fugitive, Bernadette Dohrn, from the underground, triggering thoughts of how our extraordinary, ordinary lives are so often unseen and  unnoticed. 

MY LIFE IN HIDING

My life in hiding
is not unlike your own
Each morning, I clap a tame
over my wild one, dress as you dress
train my gestures to resemble yours

Time touches me
brushing my skin. Money
slides through my hands.
Eggs siphon through my body,
sand through glass.

There are days when nothing happens,
evenings when the winter sun
turns the sky to a city in flames.
Sometimes to myself
and a stranger answers.

When the child began to grow inside me,
clambering from deeper into lighter shade,
to crown from hiding

into hiding, I saw how camouflage
contains disclosure, how each unveiling
draws us

into deeper disguise. And so I rise
from caves of wrath to live
as one of you, a woman wrapped
in silence, bearing alive
my buried name.