Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

The poems in Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem move in the space between very sexy love poems, surrealism, indictments against the treatment of Native Americans, poems of water politics. They’re important and funny and flippant and poignant and true and silly and . . . They are hard to categorize but they are not disconnected. Diaz speaks directly to the reader. She doesn’t flinch. She has the reader by the throat. Sometimes it’s a threat, and sometimes it’s just sex. Buy here.

From “American Arithmetic”

. . . 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— // Who wins a race that isn’t a race? // Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all / police killings, higher per capita than any race— // sometimes race means run. // I’m not good at math—can you blame me? / I’ve had an American education. // 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. . .

From “ How the Milky Way Was Made”

. . . Up there they glide gilled with stars. / You see them now— // god-large, gold-green sides, // lunar-white belly to breast— // making their great speeded way across the darkest hours, / rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road. // The blurred wake they drag as they make their path / through the night sky is called // ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuuny— // our words for Milky Way. // Coyote too is up there, locked in the moon / after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet // and empty slung over his back— // a prisoner blue and dreaming // of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth. / O, the weakness of any mouth // as it gives itself away to the universe // of a sweet-milk body. // As my own mouth is dreamed to thirst / the long desire-ways, the hundred thousand light-year roads // of your wrists and thighs.