" . . . . Traveling through my own time I often look back.// I am in Brighton where England's Neo-Nazis have headquarters. Where Fanny-Imlay--Wollstonecraft's daughter--killed herself, wearing her mother's watch and undergarment. . . . Brighton is an hour from Lewes--where Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse. . . . And Leonard suggested Virginia dust--but she lost interest.// These details crowd me. . . . What is left of Wollstonecraft's grave is a plaque by King's Cross Station.// In King's Cross once I saw a woman in the ladies' room--a large naked white woman accompanied by her belongings. She was standing in a corner against a wall, calmly washing herself. Wetting and soaping and drying herself with brown paper.// Other women came and went.// As a child I pressed my fingers against my closed eyes--watched the stars, planets, comets and meteorites move against them. As if I could contain the universe behind my eyelids.// It is the anniversary of the first imprisonment of the suffragists--/ Annie Kenney and Cristabel Pankhurst./ Someone has left a bouquet of irises--purple tied with ribbon--green: the colors of the movement.// These lie in front of Emmeline Pankhurst's statue which stands to the side of the Houses of Parliament. The note attached to the bouquet is in a strong and older hand--perhaps of a woman who actually remembers 1905. The ink runs in the drizzle. . . ." --Michelle Cliff, "Travel Notes" from The Land of Look Behind