When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz Read Free Book Online Page A

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,
    on the table—
    a broken bell I beg to wrap my red skin around
    until there is no apple,
    there is only this woman
    who is a city of apples,
    there is only me licking the juice
    from the streets of her palm.

    If there is a god of fruit or things devoured,
    and this is all it takes to be beautiful,
    then God, please,
    let her
    eat another apple
    tomorrow.

Toward the Amaranth Gates of War or Love

    Tonight the city is glimmered.
    What’s left of an August monsoon
    is heat and wet. Beyond the open window,
    the streetlamp is a honey-skirted hive I could split
    with my hand, my palm a pool of light.

    On the television