Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Díaz
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.”
“To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
“The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one- to the body, to the water-we do to the other. --- Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
“Maybe death is a way to clean the self, of the body, to finally celebrate it. A celebration should leave a mess.”
“The siren song returns in me, I sing it across her throat: Am I what I love? Is this the glittering world I’ve been begging for?”
“That Which Cannot Be Stilled (excerpt) All my life I’ve been working, to get clean—to be clean is to be good, in America. To be clean is the grind. Except my desert is made of sand, my skin the color of sand. It gets everywhere. America is the condition—of the blood and of the rivers, of what we can spill and who we can spill it from. A dream they call it, what is American.”
“Race implies someone will win,”
“Postcolonial Love Poem (excerpt) I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, Can stop the bleeding-most people forgot this When the war ended. The war ended Depending on which war you mean: those we started, Before those, millennia ago and onward, Those which started me, which I lost and won- Those ever-blooming wounds. --- There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to bloom. The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them in its copper current, opens them with memory— they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life. Where your hands have been are diamonds on my shoulders, down my back, thighs- I am your culebra. I am in the dirt for you. Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous, two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood- the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea. --- The rain will eventually come, or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds- The war never ended and somehow begins again.”
“Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden.”
“Insomnia is like spring that way—surprising and many petaled”
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Book Keywords:
grief, celebration, death, wisdom, life, poetry, dying
