Call it a piano tucked inside a houseboat. The woods that turn us inside out: heart which is not a salt lick. Deer which will no longer graze at our wrists at sundown. Our hands are open because they are empty. We've cuffed ourselves tight at the wrists with what is left of daylight. We've cuffed ourselves to the snow. The landscape: a hospital. The heartache: a cliché. They say what heals is to saw one's self in half & walk away as miracle. When I found out I was harboring an asterism of hearts, no one starred the sick one's closed. No one kissed us congratulations. Inside you pressed yourselves together like two playing cards, faces in profile. We embroidered your hands as an offering. We measured the distance in pulses. The variable light of your leftover X-rays still slices us off at the wrist. Your sister develops in the open air as if dipped in chemicals in a dark room. When the house -lights come on like an ambulance's dazzle, we've already left our bodies to science, we've let the unbearable constellation be halved.
"Celebratory moments are often shared in public while mourning is expected to be done in private. What happens when an experience entangles both moments? Twins present a complicated landscape—how does one not seem ungrateful for one incredible life beginning while grieving the loss of another? This poem wants to ask what it means to feel sad about celebration as well as a deep desire for others to want to celebrate."
Reviewing Natalie Diaz' Postcolonial Love Poem, Emily Pérez writes,"Conveying clear ideas through crisp, dazzling images, Diaz’s poems typically unfold in long lines grouped into short stanzas. She instructs and inquires; she mourns and rhapsodises. And though she is at the centre of several 'wars'—squaring off with institutional racism, her brother’s drug addiction and environmental destruction—she also devotes much of the collection to eros and 'wag[ing] love.'"
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"I’m not that old, but I’ve lived long enough to know that the lion’s share of my life is behind me. I know there are relationships I can’t hold on to, and places I can’t return to. I’m just beginning to see 'real time,' the arc of almost half a century, and how the generational waves, both violent and beautiful, define our species."
