"Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?"

Hello friends, I hope that you are all taking care of yourselves today according to your needs. For this week’s QSL post, I wanted to share a poem from one of my favorite collections, “Postcolonial Love Poem” by Natalie Diaz. This collection was another surprise City Lights find and is one I often return to. I can’t recommend it enough.

I hope you can find solace in this poem: “Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt holds the red jet of the hawk in its hand of dust.How is it that we know what we are?If not by the air between any hand and its want–touchI am touched–I am. This is my knee, since she touches me there. This is my throat, as defined by her reaching.What pressure—the air. Buoying me now along a minutethe size of a strange room.Who knew the air could be so treacherous to move through? An old, anxious sea,or waking too early in a coppered and indigo morning,or the bookmark she leftnear the end of the book–all deep blues and euphemisms for my anxieties.Sometimes I don't know how to make itto the other side of the bridge of atoms of a second. Except for the airbreathing me, inside, then out. Suddenly, I am still here.Escaping must be like thisfor the magician and mortal both— like lungs and air. A trickof bones and leaving any capture—a breath. Everything is iron oxide or red this morning,here in Sedona. The rocks, my love's mouth, even the chapel and its candles. Red.I have been angry this week. Christian said,Trust your anger. It is a demand for love. Or it is red. Red is a thingI can trust—a monster and her wings, cattle grazing the sandstone hills like flames.Caboose cars were once red, and also the best parts of trains—the heat and shake of what promised to pass. Finally, the red and the end of them.Maybe this living is a balance of drunkennessoff nitrogen and the unbearable atmosphere of memory.From the right distance, I can hold anything in my hand—the hawk riding a thermal,the horizon which across many days might lead to the sea, the red cliff, my loveglazed in fine red dust, your letter, even the train. Each is devoured in its own envelope of air.What we hold grows weight, becomes enough or burden.