Postcolonial Love Poem

by Natalie Díaz

There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to bloom.

The rain will eventually come, or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds— the war never ended and somehow begins again.

One way to open a body to the stars, with a knife. One way to love a sister, help her bleed light.

What is loneliness if not unimaginable light and measured in lumens— an electric bill which must be paid, a taxi cab floating across three lanes with its lamp lit, gold in wanting. At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City is empty and asking for someone.

She says, You make me feel like lightning. I say, I don’t ever want to make you feel that white.

Race is a funny word. Race implies someone will win, implies, I have as good a chance of winning as—

We do a better job of dying by police than we do existing.

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.

What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.

I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.

John Berger wrote, True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.

There is no guide. You built this museum. You have always been its Muse and Master.

Let me tell you a story about water: Once upon a time there was us. America’s thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are.

We go where there is love, to the river, on our knees beneath the sweet water. I pull her under four times, until we are rivered. We are rearranged.

The first line is in conversation with Anne Sexton’s poem “The Truth the Dead Know,” in which she wrote, “It is June. I am tired of being brave.”