Natalie Diaz | "Manhattan is a Lenape Word"
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In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of Mojave American poet, Natalie Diaz. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012.\\xa0 Source
This episode includes a reading of her poem, "Manhattan is a Lenape Word". See more of her work in our Get Lit Anthology.
"Manhattan is a Lenape Word"
It is December and we must be brave.
The ambulance\\u2019s rose of light
blooming against the window.
Its single siren-cry: Help me.
A silk-red shadow unbolting like water
through the orchard of her thigh.
Her, come\\u2014in the green night, a lion.
I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke,
dip honey with my hands stung sweet
on the darksome hive.
Out of the eater I eat. Meaning,
She is mine, colony.
The things I know aren\\u2019t easy:
I\\u2019m the only Native American
on the 8th floor of this hotel or any,
looking out any window
of a turn-of-the-century building
in Manhattan.
Manhattan is a Lenape word.
Even a watch must be wound.
How can a century or a heart turn
if nobody asks, Where have all
the natives gone?
If you are where you are, then where
are those who are not here? Not here.
Which is why in this city I have
many lovers. All my loves
are reparations loves.
What is loneliness if not unimaginable
light and measured in lumens\\u2014
an electric bill which must be paid,
a taxi cab floating across three lanes
with its lamp lit, gold in wanting.
At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City
is empty and asking for someone.
Again, the siren\\u2019s same wide note:
Help me. Meaning, I have a gift
and it is my body, made two-handed
of gods and bronze.
She says, You make me feel
like lightning. I say, I don\\u2019t ever
want to make you feel that white.
It\\u2019s too late\\u2014I can\\u2019t stop seeing
her bones. I\\u2019m counting the carpals,
metacarpals of her hand inside me.
One bone, the lunate bone, is named
for its crescent outline. Lunatus. Luna.
Some nights she rises like that in me,
like trouble\\u2014a slow luminous flux.
The streetlamp beckons the lonely
coyote wandering West 29th Street
by offering its long wrist of light.
The coyote answers by lifting its head
and crying stars.
Somewhere far from New York City,
an American drone finds then loves
a body\\u2014the radiant nectar it seeks
through great darkness\\u2014makes
a candle-hour of it, and burns
gently along it, like American touch,
an unbearable heat.
The siren song returns in me,
I sing it across her throat: Am I
what I love? Is this the glittering world
I\\u2019ve been begging for?