Postcolonial Love Poem Quotes

“I confuse instinct for desire—isn’t bite also touch?”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“To read a body is to break that body a little.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“A good window lets the outside participate.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“The rain will eventually come, or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds— the war never ended and somehow begins again.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“I, too, follow toward where I am forever returning— Her.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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?”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot repair.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Maybe death is a way to clean the self, of the body,
to finally celebrate it. A celebration should leave a mess.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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?”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“I am light now, or on the side of light—: light-head, light-trophied. Light-wracked and light-gone. The sweet maize in fluorescence—: an eruption of light, or its feast, from the stalk of my lover’s throat. And I, light-eater, light-loving.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Race implies someone will win,”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Insomnia is like spring that way—surprising
and many petaled”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City is empty and asking for someone.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“American Arithmetic (excerpt)

We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
---
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the United States.
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.

But in an American room of one hundred people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand-

and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Police kill Native Americans more than any other race. Race is a funny word. Race implies someone will win, implies, I have as good a chance of winning as—”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“This is a poor translation, like all translations.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Am I what I love? Is this the glittering world I’ve been begging for?”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“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.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Maps are ghosts: white and layered with people and places I see through.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem