Sources

Words to look up: boletus, bladder-campion, Irasburg 1968, Ashkenazi, lox

Stanza III: From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew? split at the root, raised in a castle of air? I wonder what this means. It intrigues me. Castle of air?

Split at the root – white skinned social Christian, neither gentile nor jew.

When I first read ‘vixen’ I thought she meant cunning female but later realized she meant mother fox.

Castle of air – rootless ideology. Thought system with no basis?

Stanza XXII: To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. Is she saying that everyone has the right to voice their opinion without feeling bad or alone?

“When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices: and here I write the words , in their fullness: powerful; womanly.” This quote would go in my Book of Quotes if I had one.

Looked up the words:
boletus - mushroom that can be poisonous
bladder campion - a plant
Irasburg 1968 -The incident started out as a drive-by shooting which damaged the windows of a private home, but mushroomed into the public eye as law enforcement scrutinized the victim's background, rather than going after the shooter.The victim was a black ordained minister who moved to Irasburg with his family and a white woman and her children about 14 days earlier from Seaside, Calif. The shooter turned out to be a white Glover resident who reportedly had told others before the incident he intended to "scare" and "harass" the (racial epithets). -www.caldonianrecord.com.
Ashkenazi - descended from medieval Jewish communities of Rhineland
lox - salmon that has been cured in brine and sometimes smoked.