Summary

Part II of the collection features an epigraph by Black feminist author Hortense Spillers, who writes, “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (25).

In “Asterion's Lament,” Diaz alludes to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from Greek mythology and refers to her lover's body as a labyrinth. She imagines her lover's body as a body of water from which she drinks, and upon which she sails a seafaring vessel. She compares herself to the Minotaur and describes their lovemaking as the “slake of a monster's appetite” (28).

In “Like Church,” Diaz compares her lover to the onset of evening, and a searchlight illuminating her. She suggests other the word "white" might be abandoned in favor of other, more specific words, such as “milk of magnesia” (29). She states, “They think / brown people fuck better when...