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

screen, bombs like silvery bells
    toll above blurred horizon—
    All I know of war is win.
    What is a wall if not a thing to be pressed against?
    What is a bedroom if not an epicenter
    of pillage? And what can I do with a hundred houses
    but abandon them as spent shells of desire?

    The buzz of blue burning ozone molecules—
    a hypothalamus of cavalry trumpets—
    call me to something—you,
    so willing to be crushed. I feel like I might die.
    I lean over, kiss you sitting on the sofa
    and pretend we are lying there
    stretched across that debris-dazzled desert—
    the only affliction is your mouth,
    the single ache is that I cannot crawl inside you—
    the explosions are for us.

    The war is nothing more
    than a reminder to go to Mass.
    The tolling, your sighing.
    The bombs, a carnival of bodies, touch,
    all the things we want to taste—
    an apple wedge soaked in vinegar,
    a blood orange swelling like a breast—
    those beggars of teeth.

    I want you like that—enough to gnash you
    into a silence made from pieces of silver.

    Outside, cars rush the slick streets.
    My mouth is on your thigh—
    I would die to tear just this piece of you away,
    to empty your bright dress onto the floor,
    as the bombs’ long, shadowy legs,
    march me toward the amaranth gates of the city.

Self-Portrait as a Chimera

    I am what I have done—

    A sweeping gesture to the thorn of mast jutting from my mother’s spine—spine a series of narrow steps leading to the temple of her neck where the things we worship demand we hurl her heart from that height, still warm, still humming with the holy music of an organ—

    We do. We do. We do and do and do.

    The last wild horse leaping off a cliff at Dana Point. A hurtling god carved from red clay. Wings of wind. Two satellite eyes spiraling like coals from a long-cold fire. Dreaming of Cortés, his dirty beard and the burns it left when we kissed. Yet we kissed for years and my savage hair wove around him like a noose of smoke.

    Skeletons of apples rot the gardens of Thalheim. First snow wept at the windows while I held a man’s wife in my arms. I palmed her heavy breasts like loot bags. Her teeth at my throat like a pearl necklace I could break to pieces. I would break to pieces.
Dieb.

    A bandit born with masked eyes. El Maragato’s thigh wound glittering like red lace. My love hidden away in a cave as I face the gallows each morning, her scent the bandanna around my face, her picture folded in the cuff of my boot.

    The gravediggers and their beautiful shoulder blades smooth as shovel heads. I build and build my brother a funeral, eating the dirt along the way—queen of pica, pilferer of misery feasts—hoarding my brother like a wrecked Spanish galleon. I am more cerulean than the sea I swallow each day on the way to reaching out for him, singing his name, wearing him like a dress made of debris.

    These dark rosettes name me Jaguar. These stripes are my slave dress. Black soot. Red hematite. I am filled with ink. A codex, splayed, opened, ready to be burned in the square—

    I am. I am and am and am. What have I done?

Dome Riddle

    Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull

    this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face,
    this overwound bone jack-in-the-box,
    this Orlando’s zero, Oaxacan offering:
cabeza locada, calavera azucarada, clavo jodido, cenote
of Mnemosyne,
    this sticky-sweet guilt hive,
piedra blanca del rio oscuro,
    this small-town medical mania dispensary, prescribed cranium pill,
    this electric blue tom-tom drum ticking like an Acme bomb, hypnotized explosive device, pensive general, scalp-strapped warrior, soldier with a loaded God complex,
    this Hotchkiss-obliterated headdress, Gatling-lit labyrinth,
    this memory grenade, death epithet, death epitaph, mound of
momento mori,
    this twenty-two-part talisman wearing a skirt of breasts, giant ball of
masa,
    this god patella in the long leg