“I don’t call it sleep anymore. / I’ll risk losing something new instead,” writes Natalie Diaz in her poem “From the Desire Field,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). The poem speaks from the mind of someone unable to fall asleep who attempts to find a sense of relief through their insomnia. “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden,” she writes. Emotions then begin to move away from the tension of not being able to sleep into sensuality and passion. This week write a poem that revolves around what it feels like to experience insomnia. What do you do when you can’t fall asleep?
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