by Natalie Diaz
in the wrong direction. Maybe sideways is up,
and fucked up is up, and down is hanging over
all our heads.
Then a semi passed me on the left.
I can still hear the crunch. I can feel the ones that kept crawling,
over the others, their brothers and sisters.
Busted scabs in the road.
2. aka crank bugs
Don’t tell my brother. Even though
he’s been asking, scratching for clues, picking
at the truth. Don’t tell him
there really are things skittering, creeping
across his inner arms, moving and hot, sweating—
We are, the Exodus. These glowing torches,
wounds that won’t let us go home.
3. aka delusional parasitosis
Dope is what my dad calls it. He never says meth.
And the dope always has my brother. It’s that dope,
my dad sighs, that dope’s got him.
My dad once took us to the railroad tracks,
gave each of his nine kids a penny to set on the rusted rails.
My brother wanted a dollar, not a penny.
Because it’s hard to turn a firstborn son away, he got it,
shoved it down into his pocket, walked away from us.
We placed our pennies along the rails he balanced on,
his heels squeaked against the metal, arm stretched
out on each side. I knew then that he’d do it. He’d crucify himself
one day, just like that day—arms nailed to a horizon of salt cedars,
date palms, the purple mountains behind him sharp as needles.
4. aka sensation on the nerve endings
When my brother steals my dad’s truck,
my dad walks through town
with the hoboes and train hoppers,
stray dogs, hungry accordions, the dirty-faced
and gray-heeled girls
who flock outside our gate like pigeons
after my brother’s crumbs.
On these days my dad drags his feet
across my brother’s skin— Just to remind him, my dad says,
that I am old, I am tired,
I am his father.
5. aka meth sores
We are too weak to say the word intervention.
When my brother nods off, I write it on his arms and face in cursive
with invisible ink— No one wants to embarrass him.
You shouldn’t embarrass him, my mom says,
Understand he’s a grown man. He won’t stand there
while you embarrass him. But I’m embarrassed.
I can’t understand. Why are we all just standing here
while he tears the temple to pieces?
Mariposa Nocturna
Esta luz, este fuego que devora
Federico García Lorca
Thaïs has burst my shirt to flames, you say,
that kerosene cunt, chingadera.
I remind you again, you are shirtless,
sin camisa, sin vergüenza, sin, sin, sin.
Brother, I am ashamed. Me muero de vergüenza.
Your toothlessness. Your caved lips.
How light flees you. Mi hermano, mariposa nocturna.
You march behind Thaïs anyway,
mad Macedonian prince, Príncipe de Coger,
with only one flip-flop clapping.
Jeers echo the alleyway, Calle de los Perros.
Stop this fool parade. Estoy suplicando,
Find your missing shoe.
Mother’s wet dresses, los trajes vacíos,
strung from the clotheslines above. Un collar de fantasmas.
How you laugh, Brother. Ríete.
You say, They are raining, the ladies are raining.
Pero mi mamá llueve.
It is clearly midnight. In the sky a stampede. Elephants
licking their tusks. Cielo de dientes.
This hour is your temple. The waxing moon your altar.
What you pray for stains.
Hermano de flautas y pipas. Rats are wild
at work building your shadow armor.
Eres una sombra de ratas.
Thaïs kisses like an ember, you whisper,
already hard, with thoughts of what you will love
into blaze tonight—que amas—
already ash. Come morning the fields too will go
to smoke. Now, the lamp-lit moths tremble,
no longer themselves, gleaming with sex. You,
your bare foot, slicing through the city
dark as a scythe.
Black Magic Brother
My brother’s shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician’s cape.
My personal charlatan glittering in woofle dust and loaded
with gimmicks and gaffs.
A train of dirty cabooses, of once-beautiful girls,
follows my magus man like a chewed tail
helping him perform his tricks.
He calls them his Beloveds, his Sim Sala Bimbos, juggles them,
shoves them into pipes packed hot hard as cannons and Wham Bam
Ala-Kazam! whirls them to smoke.
Sometimes he vanishes their teeth then points his broken wand up
into the starry desert sky, says, Voilà! There they are!
and the girls giggle, revealing neon gums and purple throats.
My brother. My mago.
The consummate professional, he is dependable—performs daily,
nightly, in the living room, a forever-matinee, an always-late-shaman-show:
Come one, come all! Behold the spectacle
of the Prince of Prestidigitators.
As the main attraction (drumroll please) he pulls animals from a hole
in his crotch—
you thought I’d say hat, but you don’t know my black magic brother—
and those animals love him like the first animals loved God
when He gave them names.
My brother. Our perpetual encore—
he riddles my father with red silk scarves before sawing him in half
with a steak knife. Now we have two fathers,
one who weeps anytime he hears the word Presto!
The other who drags his feet down the hall at night.
Neither has the stomach for steak anymore.
My mother, too, is gone somewhere
in one of the pockets of my brother’s bluest tuxedo:
Abracadabrantesque!
The audience is we—we have the stubs to prove it—
and we have been here for years, in velvet chairs the color of wounds,
waiting for something to fall,
maybe the curtain, maybe the crucifix on the wall,
or, maybe the pretty white doves my brother made disappear—
Now we see them, now we don’t—
will fall from his sleeves like angels—
right before our very eyes.
A Brother Named Gethsemane
Naked blue boy put down your pipe. They found your shoes in the meadow. Mom’s and Dad’s hearts are overripe.
Pluck that crimson orb rusted package from the branches mother’s arms our tree you’ve chopped away at for too long with your mouth-bright ax pretty-teethed boy. Chop chop-ping. No stopping this Lost-boy-of-our-wilting-garden. Peter Pan wannabe. Peter be wanna pan. Oh don’t grow up now. Don’t turn away from the gapings on Mama’s trunk. Watch them glow with us electric gashes wounds like hurt-lanterns you’ve lit. Sit Indian-legged under this moon. Hurtling shiny bullet. Hungry boy. Licking your ruby-crusted lips. Fingerpicking father’s red-swelled eyes from where he cowers. A beat bush smoldering with shame. Old men should be allowed to sob in privacy. Turn up the radio. Tune in to the border stations those pirate Mexican heroin melodies. We’ve got to got to got to get back to that stinking garden.
Flyblown figs shimmer at you my bug-eyed boy. The glitzy-bodied flies boogie-w
oogie to your static grin numbing you while sexy screwworms empty you like a black hole. Ecstasy that must look pretty from inside—to core not just an apple but the entire orchard the family even the dog. Leave the shells to the crows. A field of red lampshades in the dark Garden of Myiasis. This is no cultivated haven. This is the earth riddled with a brother. The furrows are mountains. Waves of sand and we are ships wrecked. What’s left of a fleet of one hundred shadows shattered and bleached. A crop gone to sticks. The honeysuckle sags with bright sour powder. We have followed the flames followed him here where all the black birds in the world have fallen like a shotgun blast to the faded ground. The vines have hardened to worms baking in the desert heat. We are at the gate shaking the gate climbing the gate clanging our cups against the gate. This is no garden. This is my brother and I need a shovel to love him.
Soirée Fantastique
Houdini arrived first, with Antigone on his arm.
Someone should have told her it was rude
to chase my brother in circles with such a shiny shovel.
She only said, I’m building the man a funeral.
But last I measured, my brother was still a boy.
The doorbell chimes and chimes.
Other guests come
in and out, snorting, mouths lathered, eyes spinning
like Spyro Gyros. They are starving, bobbing their big heads,
ready for a party. They keep saying it too, Man, we’re ready
for a party! In their glorious twirl and dervish, none of them notices
this is no dinner party. This is a jalopy carousel—and we are
dizzy. We are
here to eat the horses.
There are violins playing. The violins are on fire—
they are passed around until we’re all smoking. Jesus coughs,
climbs down from the cross of railroad ties above the table.
He’s a regular at these carrion revelries, and it’s annoying
how he turns the bread to fish, especially when we have sandwiches.
I’ve never had the guts
to ask Jesus, Why?
Old Houdini can’t get over ’em—the hole in each of Jesus’s hands—
he’s smitten, and drops first a butter knife, then a candelabra through
the gaping in the right hand. He holds Jesus’s left palm up to his face,
wriggles his tongue through the opening, then spits,
says, This tastes like love. He laughs hysterically, Admit it Chuy,
between you and me,
someone else is coming.
Antigone is back, this time with the green-handled garden spade.
Where is your brother? she demands. She doesn’t realize
this is not my brother’s feast—he simply set the table.
Poor Antigone. Bury the horses, instead, I tell her.
What will we eat then? she weeps, not knowing weeping
isn’t what it used to be, not here.
Poor, poor, Antigone.
I look around for Houdini to get her out of here.
He’s escaped. In the corner, Jesus covers his face with his hands—
each hole an oubliette—I see right through them:
None of us belong here. I’m the only one left to say it.
I ease the spade from her hand. I explain:
We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten.
Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.
No More Cake Here
When my brother died
I worried there wasn’t enough time
to deliver the one hundred invitations
I’d scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary:
Because of the short notice no need to RSVP.
Unfortunately the firemen couldn’t come.
(I had hoped they’d give free rides on the truck.)
They did agree to drive by the house once
with the lights on— It was a party after all.
I put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons,
let them blow as many years of my brother’s name,
jails, twenty-dollar bills, midnight phone calls,
fistfights, and ER visits as they could let go of.
The scarlet balloons zigzagged along the ceiling
like they’d been filled with helium. Mom blew up
so many that she fell asleep. She slept for ten years—
she missed the whole party.
My brothers and sisters were giddy, shredding
his stained T-shirts and raggedy pants, throwing them up
into the air like confetti.
When the clowns came in a few balloons slipped out
the front door. They seemed to know where
they were going and shrank to a fistful of red grins
at the end of our cul-de-sac. The clowns played toy bugles
until the air was scented with rotten raspberries.
They pulled scarves from Mom’s ear—she slept through it.
I baked my brother’s favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting).
When I counted there were ninety-nine of us in the kitchen.
We all stuck our fingers in the mixing bowl.
A few stray dogs came to the window.
I heard their stomachs and mouths growling
over the mariachi band playing in the bathroom.
(There was no room in the hallway because of the magician.)
The mariachis complained about the bathtub acoustics.
I told the dogs, No more cake here, and shut the window.
The fire truck came by with the sirens on. The dogs ran away.
I sliced the cake into ninety-nine pieces.
I wrapped all the electronic equipment in the house,
taped pink bows and glittery ribbons to them—
remote controls, the Polaroid, stereo, Shop-Vac,
even the motor to Dad’s work truck—everything
my brother had taken apart and put back together
doing his crystal meth tricks—he’d always been
a magician of sorts.
Two mutants came to the door.
One looked almost human. They wanted
to know if my brother had willed them the pots
and pans and spoons stacked in his basement bedroom.
They said they missed my brother’s cooking and did we
have any cake. No more cake here, I told them.
Well, what’s in the piñata? they asked. I told them
God was and they ran into the desert, barefoot.
I gave Dad his slice and put Mom’s in the freezer.
I brought up the pots and pans and spoons
(really, my brother was a horrible cook), banged them
together like a New Year’s Day celebration.
My brother finally showed up asking why
he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake.
He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit
because I’d imagined it all. The worst part he said was
he was still alive. The worst part he said was
he wasn’t even dead. I think he’s right, but maybe
the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe
the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.
III
I Watch Her Eat the Apple
She twirls it in her left hand,
a small red merry-go-round.
According to the white oval sticker,
she holds apple #4016.
I’ve read in some book or other
of four thousand fifteen fruits she held
before this one, each equally dizzied
by the heat in the tips of her fingers.
She twists the stem, pulls it
like the pin of a grenade, and I just know
somewhere someone is sitting alone on a porch,
bruised, opened up to their wet white ribs,
riddled by her teeth
—
lucky.
With her right hand, she lifts the sticker
from the skin. Now,
the apple is more naked than any apple has been
since two bodies first touched the leaves
of ache in the garden.
Maybe her apple is McIntosh, maybe Red Delicious.
I only know it is the color of something I dreamed,
some thing I gave to her after being away
for ten thousand nights.
The apple pulses like a red bird in her hand—
she is setting the red bird free,
but the red bird will not go,
so she pulls it to her face as if to tell it a secret.
She bites, cleaving away a red wing.
The red bird sings. Yes,
she bites the apple and there is music—
a branch breaking, a ship undone by the shore,
a knife making love to a wound, the sweet scrape
of a match lighting the lamp of her mouth.
This blue world has never needed a woman
to eat an apple so badly, to destroy an apple,
to make the apple bone—
and she does it.
I watch her eat the apple,
carve it to the core, and set it, wobbling,