In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need? - Natalie Diaz

Poetry was an unlikely place for me to land … I mean, who says: ‘I’m going to be a poet when I grow up’? I grew up on a reservation and we had a boarding school where language was taken.

I am Native, so I am both—truth/fiction—and also bleeding over or overflowing each. Truth is always a placeholder for something. For how we feel, or how we want to feel, how we wished we didn’t feel. Things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t done, hadn’t enjoyed doing. The way we handle or mishandle our wounds, and try to hold them up and look through them, like mirrors, to be seen, no matter how opaque and obstructed they are. You can’t trust truth. But then, even the word trust. . . what is that a placeholder for?

I had to be willing to risk myself for what I wanted. And I want desire; I want to be capable of it. I want to be deserving of it.