Happy Birthday Lidia Yuknavitch

Yours is The Book generations of women will press to a beat beneath their left tit as they brave college classrooms the first time, or the next time, or the last time even; it’s with them between classes, between sentences, on lunch breaks and trains; they’ll read your book alongside bodies of water and stoking fires and confronting rage; before and after every other book they’re told to read; they’ll slip out bedroom windows, from negligees, from beneath the dead weight  of shame; they’ll read your book around campfires and by flashlight and sitting on benches in the heat of day; they’ll pass it to each other with love notes and lip prints like arrows that point the way. By now, they’ve memorized passages. Words in mind like ink on skin.  

They’re prepared to write-the-good-fight now feeling not only the rhythm your book lent us but the courage you gave.