I Lean Out The Window Analysis Essay

When the word “erotic” is used, it generally conjures up images of sex and desire; these are, after all, the primary connotations of the word, and often figure into dictionary definitions in some form or another. As such, it is easy to label Natalie Diaz’s “I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table” as an erotic poem because it suggests a short, post-coital scene between lovers. However, in keeping with the content of Deborah Miranda's essay on the erotic, "Hummingbirds, Dildos, and Driving Her Crazy," Diaz does not paint a scene filled with life and creative energy, but a scene that is in the process of coming apart at the seams. It is by including imagery of death, destruction, and subtle undoing, that Diaz crafts a love poem that wears the mask of the erotic to hide its anti-erotic nature.
From the start, the speaker of the poem contributes to the false impression of the erotic. While her lover is asleep, she paints "Valencia oranges across her skin,/seven times the color orange" (Diaz 2-3). Fruit is an image often applied to enforce an

Her speaker becomes candid, doing away with her colorful sketches and tracings to express a critical difference between herself and her sleeping lover in the lines that read “She has always been more orchard than loved,/I, more bite than mouth” (Diaz 26-27). Where the sleeping lover remains tied to fruit and tranquility, the speaker exposes her intrinsic values as stemming from the violence of a bite. She is detrimental by nature, using her mouth not to kiss her lover or perform other sexual acts, but to bite, to tear with her teeth and consume. The erotic would show itself as a balance or construction in which each component builds on the other, but here, half of the whole exists as a devourer of the orchard it keeps