"And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other? Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?"
--- Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem (Faber & Faber, 2020)
Natalie Diaz believes her body is a river. The Colorado River that is dying --- both inside and outside the poem. A river stretching 1,450 miles across the American Southwest, flowing and rippling through her body and her identity as 'Aha Makav. In their tradition, the words for body and land are distinguished by only one small sound, 'ii and 'a. Without context, an outsider would not know whether what is wounded is the body or the land: because both are the same thing.