Read When My Brother Was an Aztec Online
Authors: Natalie Diaz
When My Brother Was an Aztec (8 page)
Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the possessors of the elephant?
al-Fil, sura 105, Qur'an
My brother still hears the tanks
when he is angryâthey rumble like a herd of hot green
elephants over the plowed streets inside him, crash through
the white oleanders lining my parents' yard
during family barbecues, great scarred ears flapping, commanding
a dust storm that shakes blooms from the stalks like wrecked stars.
One thousand and one sleepless nights
bulge their thick skulls, gross elephant boots pummel
ice chests, the long barrels of their trunks crush cans of cheap beer
and soda pop in quick, sparkling bursts of froth,
and the meat on the grill goes to debris in the flames
while the rest of us cower beneath lawn chairs.
When the tusked animals in my brother's miserable eyes
finally fall asleep standing up, I find the nerve to ask him
what they sound like, and he tells me,
It's no hat dance,
and says that unless I've felt the bright beaks of ancient Stymphalian birds,
unless I've felt the color red raining from Heaven and marching
in my veins, I'll never know the sound of war.
But I do know that since my brother's been back,
orange clouds hang above him like fruit made of smoke,
and he sways in trancelike pachyderm rhythm
to the sweet tings of death music circling
circling his head like an explosion of bluebottle flies
haloing himâ
I'm no saint,
he sighs, flicking each one away.
He doesn't sit in chairs anymore and is always on his feet,
hovering by the window, peeking out the door,
Because,
he explains,
everyone is the enemy, even you, even me.
The heat from guns he'll never let go
rises up from his fists like a desert mirage, blurring
everything he tries to touch or holdâ If we cry
when his hands disappear like that, he laughs,
Those hands,
he tells us,
those little Frankensteins
were never my friends.
But before all this, I waited for him
as he floated down the airport escalator in his camouflage BDUs.
An army-issued duffel bag dangled from his shouldersâ
hot green elephants,
their arsenal of memory, rocking inside.
He was home. He was gone.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
WisÅawa Szymborska
In the Kashmir mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,
dyed white desert sand crimson.
What is there to say to a man
who has traversed such a world,
whose hands and eyes have
betrayed him?
Were there flowers there?
I asked.
This is what he told me:
In a village, many men
wrapped a woman in a sheet.
She didn't struggle.
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.
They laid her in the road
and stoned her.
The first man was her father.
He threw two stones in a row.
Her brother had filled his pockets
with stones on the way there.
The crowd was a hive
of disturbed bees. The volley
of stones against her body
drowned out her moans.
Blood burst through the sheet
like a patch of violets,
a hundred roses in bloom.
When we were children, we traced our knees,
shins, and elbows for the slightest hint of wound,
searched them for any sad red-blue scab marking us
both victim and survivor.
All this before we knew that some wounds can't heal,
before we knew the jagged scars of Great-Grandmother's
amputated legs, the way a rock can split a man's head
open to its red syrup, like a watermelon, the way a brother
can pick at his skin for snakes and spiders only he can see.
Maybe you have grown out of yoursâ
maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you
onto every bus, through the side streets of a new town,
maybe you have never set them rocking in the lamplight
on a nightstand beside a stranger's bed, carrying your hurts
like two cracked pomegranates, because you haven't learned
to see the beauty of a busted fruit, the bright stain it will leave
on your lips, the way it will make people want to kiss you.
Buzzards
able oarsmen
drag black oars
dripping foam
commandeering this rat-gilded vessel and hull
full with ghosts
shoving dead elephants across the menagerie deck
overboard
The smooth thick bones float
end over end wandering jagged ocean floorâ
Patellae shifting like dandelion seed A Halloween mask
of pelvic bone roams a neighborhood in a dream Silvered
horseshoes of mandibles canter spitting sand
âtumbling skeletons of magnolia petals smitten by July
windâ
but none of this before the wrecked bodies
turn sponge and tusk
swell even as the gray flesh is carried
sucked away to the bellies of lamprey
Crustacea dressed in teeth
I am a fool
This is no sea Clouds not reef not stone
This heavy coat is atmosphere The vultures
dredge cast-iron ladles Not oars
Taste hearts and turnips
in their throats Sky is cauldron
How they stir
this awful elixir Gods and bombs
zagging through the air like coins
down an empty well No eye of newt
No hair of bezoar Mandrake either
Just the willingness to hold
to lie
quiet as a carcass
sleep is good, better is death
Heinrich Heine, “Morphine”
I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out,
Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow!
With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars.
The lion didn't want to do itâ
He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit, and he told the crowd this:
I only wanted some goddamn sleep.
The crowd had trouble believing the words sliding out of the lion's mouth, a mouth the size of a cathedral with a vaulted ceiling, maxilla and mandible each like a flying buttress. They believed the lion even less when they saw that one or two of his words had been impaled on his teeth, which were pointed and lined up in a semicircle like large pink wigwams at a war party. The crowd scattered, fleeing to the pagoda bridge over the koi pond and the tinted windows of the humid reptile house.
But, I believed the lionâ
I had seen him yawn. I had fallen in love with that yawn and my thighs panged just thinking about laying my head inside that wet dark bed of jaws. So, I stayed, despite the man glittering and oozing on the ground like a mortal wound.
About the time the lion burped up the man's jeans, now as shredded as a blue grass skirt, a jeep of twelve zoo workers screeched around the rhino exhibit in SWAT gear and khaki shortsâto rescue the man who was crumpled on the floor like a red dress that had too many drinksâ
their tranquilizer guns shone like Saint Michael's swords, and they each held a handful of dope-filled darts with neon pink feathers at the ends.
The lion paid this Zoo Crusade little attention and burped up the man's asshole next. He looked at me and said,
I hate assholes.
(Seven darts hit him at once, causing him to wince.)
But,
the lion continued,
the eyesâ¦you can't beat those salty, olivelike eyes.
An ear dangled like a yo-yo from his goatee as he shook his massive rock-star hair and stumbled off toward a shallow cave at the back of his cage, dragging his tail behind him like a medieval flail. All seven darts jangled and clicked from his flanks like a tambourine made of pink aloe flowers. The Zoo Delta Force Team followed behind him, stepping in the thick tracks his heavy tail had made. The crowd, now hiding out like two separate groups of bandits, was wary of the animals they found themselves near at that particular moment: the gaping gobs of the electric koi beneath the surface of the flotsamed pond, opening and closing their lips in a song shaped like skulls, and the agile maws of the boa constrictors and pythons, unhinging and resetting their jaws like basement doors. But I believed the lion and rang my bowl against the cage to let them know.
About the Author
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed an MFA in poetry and fiction from Old Dominion University in 2007. She currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the books and periodicals in which these poems first appeared: “Why I Don't Mention Flowers When Conversations with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences” in
Best New Poets 2007
and
The Southeast Review;
“How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs,” “The Gospel of Guy No-Horse,” “The Last Mojave Indian Barbie,” “Reservation Mary,” and “Tortilla Smoke: a Genesis” in
Black Renaissance Noire;
“Lorca's Red Dresses” in
Cider Press Review;
“Apotheosis of Kiss” in
Crab Orchard Review;
“Dome Riddle,” “Reservation Grass,” and “Self Portrait as a Chimera” in
Drunken Boat;
“As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Lightbulbs,” “Downhill Triolets,” “I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table,” “Mariposa Nocturna,” “Soirée Fantastique,” “Toward the Amaranth Gates of War or Love,” and “When the Beloved Asks, âWhat Would You Do If You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?'” in
Narrative;
“My Brother At 3 a.m.,” “No More Cake Here,” “The Elephants,” and “When My Brother Was an Aztec” in
Nimrod International Journal;
“Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” in
North American Review;
“Hand-Me-Down Halloween,” “I Watch Her Eat the Apple,” “If Eve Side-Stealer and Mary Busted-Chest Ruled the World,” and “Métis,” now titled “The Red Blues,”
in
Prairie Schooner;
“Black Magic Brother” and “Why I Hate Raisins” in
Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas;
“The Wild Life Zoo” in
Winning Writers.
Thank you to Khadijah Queen, Lee Quinby, and the Courting Risk Reading Series; Carol Spaulding-Kruse, Jennifer Perrine, and the Drake University Writers and Critics Series; Rosemary Catacalos, Anisa Onofre, and Gemini Ink; Idyllwild Arts Academy; Fran Ringold and the
Nimrod
staff; and the Old Dominion Creative Writing Department for providing opportunities that were important to developing this manuscript.
Thank you to Michael Wiegers and Copper Canyon Press for the opportunity to publish my first book.
I am lucky to count many good people as my family and friends, and I am grateful for their support of my work. I am indebted to the generosity that has been shown to me on so many occasions.
Copyright 2012 by Natalie Diaz
All rights reserved
Cover art: Roberto Westbrook
ISBN: 978-1-55659-383-3
eISBN: 978-1-61932-033-8
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