Ballad

Even though Sanchez uses no names and only one gender-revealing pronoun in this poem, the clues in the poem and the authorial and historical context suggest the speaker and the person to whom she is speaking are both women. In the third stanza, the speaker talks about “fix[ing]” her body “under his” (Lines 17- 18), suggesting the dominance of the man. The reason the term “dominance” is appropriate here is because she follows up the above line with “all trace of me / was wiped away” (Lines 20-21). These lines appear to imply that the speaker lost her identity to the man she was with, or to the relationship as a whole; therefore, this identity becomes difficult to change. The term “fixed” in Line 17 suggests, on one hand, that she does not want to leave the joy she feels in that moment but, on the other hand, suggests the inflexibility of her role as woman in the heterosexual relationship. The lowercase “i” throughout the poem also adds to the speaker’s vulnerability, i.e., making herself smaller than her male partner.

Ultimately, the speaker remembers the moment of the two of them in bed before she goes “to sleep in love” (Line 19), but she does not remember “when or who” (Line 15) it was.