From the Desire Field

Natalie Diaz has made several explanatory remarks about this poem. In a note that accompanied its publication, she claims to have written it as a “poem-letter” to her friend, and fellow poet, Ada Limón, as part of a correspondence that took place over a period of several months. It is one of the first poems in which she addresses her anxieties, something Diaz felt capable of doing, because she was writing to a close friend rather than addressing an audience.

The poem begins with the speaker referring to her insomnia. She states that she is no longer going to call it losing sleep. She will invent a new term for it and then say she has lost that, just as the friend to whom she is writing lost her “rosen moon, shook it loose” (Line 3). This is an obscure reference and perhaps only Diaz and Ada Limón know what “rosen moon” refers to. (A company in the United Kingdom called Rosen Moon sells designer silver jewelry.)

In Line 4, the speaker presents herself as a horned beast. Perhaps she is thinking of the Minotaur in Greek myth, a beast that hid in a labyrinth. (In Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, one poem is titled “I, Minotaur.