When My Brother Was an Aztec (6 page)

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-woogie 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.

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.

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

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.

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,

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

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:

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.

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.

Tonight the city is glimmered.

is heat and wet. Beyond the open window,

with my hand, my palm a pool of light.

toll above blurred horizon—

What is a wall if not a thing to be pressed against?

of pillage? And what can I do with a hundred houses

The buzz of blue burning ozone molecules—

call me to something—you,

I lean over, kiss you sitting on the sofa

stretched across that debris-dazzled desert—

the single ache is that I cannot crawl inside you—

The war is nothing more

The tolling, your sighing.

all the things we want to taste—

a blood orange swelling like a breast—

I want you like that—enough to gnash you

Outside, cars rush the slick streets.

I would die to tear just this piece of you away,

as the bombs' long, shadowy legs,

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—

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—