by Natalie Diaz
Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives.
My brother pointed to the corner house.
His lips flickered with sores.
Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives.
O God, I can see the tail, he said. O God, look.
Mom winced at the sores on his lips.
It’s sticking out from behind the house.
O God, see the tail, he said. Look at the goddamned tail.
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the front steps.
Mom finally saw it, a hellish vision, my brother.
O God, O God, she said.
Zoology
My father brought home a zebra from Sinaloa. This house is a zoo, my mother wept. Ay, but this amazing creature is for you, mi vida, he said. You only give me beasts, she sobbed, flinging herself over the bony, swayed back of the zebra. She loosened a new Colorado River of tears, so much water that the zebra’s stripes melted and pooled at his ankles like four beaten prisoners. Ay, you see, my father howled, you ruined it. Amor, it is no zebra. It is a burro painted like a zebra. But, don’t be sad. The beasts are not beasts. They are our children painted like hyenas.
We knew better. My mother had been weeping for one hundred years, and in all that time, our ghoulish mouths had grown redder, our beady eyes darker, and our wet teeth even longer. Faces she couldn’t scrub from our heads. Tails that always grew back.
With one hundred years comes wisdom, and my mother was right. We are a zoo, and we will not spare even our parents the price of admission—they will pay to watch us eat el burro. My father will fall on his knees like a man who has just lost his zebra. My mother will paint the thin gray bars of a cage over her skin and reach out for us.
How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs
If he’s wearing knives for eyes,
if he’s dressed for a Day of the Dead parade—
three-piece skeleton suit, cummerbund of ribs—
his pelvic girdle will look like a Halloween mask.
The bones, he’ll complain, make him itch. Each ulna
a tingle. His mandible might tickle.
If he cannot stop scratching, suggest that he change,
but not because he itches—do it for the scratching,
do it for the bones.
Okay, okay, he’ll give in, I’ll change.
He’ll go back upstairs, and as he climbs away,
his back will be something else—one shoulder blade
a failed wing, the other a silver shovel.
He hasn’t eaten in years. He will never change.
Be some kind of happy he didn’t appear dressed
as a greed god—headdress of green quetzal feathers,
jaguar loincloth littered with bite-shaped rosettes—
because tonight you are not in the mood
to have your heart ripped out. It gets old,
having your heart ripped out,
being opened up that way.
Your brother will come back down again,
this time dressed as a Judas effigy.
I know, I know, he’ll joke. It’s not Easter. So what?
Be straight with him. Tell him the truth.
Tell him, Judas had a rope around his neck.
When he asks if an old lamp cord will do, just shrug.
He’ll go back upstairs, and you will be there,
close enough to the door to leave, but you won’t.
You will wait, unsure of what you are waiting for.
Wait for him in the living room
of your parents’ home-turned-misery-museum.
Visit the perpetual exhibits: Someone Is Tapping
My Phone, Como Deshacer a Tus Padres,
Jesus Told Me To, and Mon Frère—
ten, twenty, forty dismantled phones dissected
on the dining table: glinting snarls of copper,
sheets of numbered buttons, small magnets,
jagged, ruptured shafts of lithium batteries,
empty 2-liters of Diet Coke with dirty tubing snaking
from the necks, shells of Ataris, radios, television sets,
and the Electrolux, all cracked open like dark nuts,
innards heaped across the floor.
And your pick for Best of Show:
Why Dad Can’t Find the Lightbulbs—
a hundred glowing bells of gutted lightbulbs,
each rocking in a semicircle on the counter
beneath Mom’s hanging philodendron.
Your parents’ home will look like an al-Qaeda
yard sale. It will look like a bomb factory,
which might give you hope, if there were
such a thing. You are not so lucky—
there is no fuse here for you to find.
Not long ago, your brother lived with you.
You called it, One last shot, a three-quarter-court
heave, a buzzer-beater to win something of him back.
But who were you kidding? You took him in
with no grand dreams of salvation, but only to ease
the guilt of never having tried.
He spent his nights in your bathroom
with a turquoise BernzOmatic handheld propane torch,
a Merlin mixing magic, then shape-shifting into lions,
and tigers, and bears, Oh fuck, pacing your balcony
like Borges’s blue tiger, fighting the cavalry in the moon,
conquering night with his blue flame, and plotting to steal
your truck keys, hidden under your pillow.
Finally, you found the nerve to ask him to leave,
so he took his propane torch and left you
with his meth pipe ringing in the dryer.
Now, he’s fresh-released from Rancho Cucamonga—
having traveled the Mojave Trail in chains—
living with your parents, and you have come
to take him to dinner—because he is your brother,
because you heard he was cleaning up,
because dinner is a thing with a clear beginning
and end, a measured amount of time,
a ritual everyone knows, even your brother.
Sit down. Eat. Get up. Go home.
Holler upstairs to your brother to hurry.
He won’t come right away.
Remember how long it took the Minotaur
to escape the labyrinth.
Your father will be in the living room, too,
sitting in a rocking chair in the dark,
wearing his luchador mask—he is El Santo.
His face is pale. His face is bone-white. His eyes
are hollow teardrops. His mouth a dark, O—
He is still surprised by what his life has become.
Don’t dare think about unmasking your father.
His mask is the only fight he has left.
He is bankrupt of planchas and topes.
He has no more huracanranas to give.
Leave him to imagine himself jumping
over the top rope, out of the ring,
running off, his silver-masked head
cutting the night like a butcher knife.
When your brother finally appears,
the lamp cord knotted at his neck
should do the trick, so leave to the restaurant.
It will be hard to look at him in the truck,
dressed as a Judas effigy. Don’t forget,
a single match could devour him like a neon
tooth, canopying him in a bright tent of pain—
press the truck’s lighter into the socket.
Meth—his singing sirens, his jealous jinn
conjuring up sandstorms within him, his Harpy
harem—has sucked the beauty from his face.
He is a Cheshire cat, a gang of grins.
His new face all jaw, all smile and bite.
Look at your brother—he is Borges’s bestiary.
He is a zoo of imaginary beings.
it flexes in the wind coming in through the window,
resetting and rehinging, opening and closing
against its will. It will occur to you
your brother is a beat-down, dubbed Bruce Lee—
his words do not match his mouth, which is moving
faster and faster. You have the fastest
brother alive.
Your brother’s lips are ruined.
There is a sore in the right corner of his mouth.
My teeth hurt, he says. He will ask to go
to the IHS dentist. At a stoplight, you are forced
to look into his mouth—it is Švankmajer’s rabbit hole—
you have been lost in it for the last ten years.
Pull into the restaurant parking lot.
Your brother will refuse to wear his shoes.
Judas was barefoot, he will tell you.
Judas wore sandals, you answer.
No, Jesus wore sandals, he’ll argue.
Maybe one day you will laugh at this—
arguing with a meth head dressed
like a Judas effigy about Jesus’s sandals.
Your brother will still itch when you are seated
at your table. He will rake his fork against his skin.
Look closer—his skin is a desert.
Half a red racer is writhing along his forearm.
A migration of tarantulas moves like a shadow
over his sunken cheeks.
Every time the waitress walks by, he licks his lips
at her. He tells you, then her, that he can taste her.
Hope she ignores him. Pretend not to hear
what he says. Also ignore the cock crowing
inside him. But if he notices you noticing,
Don’t worry, he’ll assure you, The dogs will get it.
Which dogs? You have to ask.
Then he’ll point out the window at two dogs humping
in the empty lot across the way.
Go ahead. Tell him. Those are not dogs,
you’ll say. Those are chupacabras.
Chupacabras are not real, he’ll tell you,
brothers are. And he’ll be right.
The reflection in your empty plate will speak,
Your brother is on drugs again.
You are at a dinner neither of you can eat.
Consider your brother: he is dressed
as a Judas effigy. When the waitress takes your order,
your brother will ask for a beer.
You will pour your thirty pieces of silver
onto the table and ask, What can I get for this?
Downhill Triolets
SISYPHUS AND MY BROTHER
The phone rings—my brother was arrested again.
Dad hangs up, gets his old blue Chevy going, and heads to the police station.
It’s not the first time. It’s not even the second.
No one is surprised my brother was arrested again.
The guy fell on my knife, was his one-phone-call explanation.
(He stabbed a man five times in the back is the official accusation.)
My brother is arrested again and again. And again
our dad, our Sisyphus, pushes his old blue heart up to the station.
GOD, LIONEL RICHIE, AND MY BROTHER
Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth’s got my brother in the slammer again.
God told him, Break into Grandma’s house, and Lionel Richie gave him that feeling of dancing on the ceiling.
My dad said, At 2 a.m., God and Lionel Richie don’t make good friends.
Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth’s got my brother by the balls again.
With God in one ear and Lionel in the other, who can win?
Not my brother, so he made a meth pipe from the lightbulb and smoked himself reeling.
Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means my brother’s tweaked himself into jail again.
It wasn’t his fault, not with God guiding his foot through the door and honey-voiced Lionel whispering, Hard to keep your feet on the ground with such a smooth-ass ceiling.
TRIBAL COPS, GERONIMO, JIMI HENDRIX, AND MY BROTHER
The tribal cops are in our front yard calling in on a little black radio: I got a 10-15 for 2-6-7 and 4-15.
The 10-15 they got is my brother, a Geronimo wannabe who thinks he’s holding out. In his mind he’s playing backup for Jimi—
he is an itching, bopping head full of “Fire.” Mom cried, Stop acting so crazy, but he kept banging air drums against the windows and ripped out all the screens.
This time, we called the cops, and when they came we just watched—we have been here before and we know 2-6-7 and 4-15 will get him 10-15.
His eyes are escape caves torchlit by his 2-6-7 of choice: crystal methamphetamine.
Finally, he’s in the back of the cop car, hands in handcuffs shiny and shaped like infinity.
Now that he’s 10-15, he’s kicking at the doors and security screen, a 2-6-7 fiend saying, I got desires that burn and make me wanna 4-15.
His tongue is flashing around his mouth like a world’s fair Ferris wheel—but he’s no Geronimo, Geronimo would find a way out instead of giving in so easily.
As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Lightbulbs
—my parents live without light, groping,
never reading, never saying, You are lovely.
A broken Borges and a gouged Saint Lucia, hand in hand,
shuffling from the kitchen linoleum to the living room rug.
—my father’s pants are wobbling silhouettes.
My mother is bluer than her nightgown.
One says rosaries to become a candle.
The other tries hard to be a Coleman fishing lantern
on the bank of a river twenty years away, watching
a boy he loves stab a hook through a worm.
—my parents eat matches like there’s no tomorrow,
but just because they choke on today doesn’t mean they aren’t
proactive: They’re building a funeral pyre out of their house.
— it’s hard to visit.
—we are always digging each other out from an intimate
sort of rubble—I recognize some things: my brother’s
high school football helmet, First Communion pin,
ceramic handprint, green plastic army men with noses
and arms chopped off, a handheld propane torch…
…so much more has been disguised by being dismantled
and fiendishly reassembled at 2 a.m.—lives, guitar amps,
the electric Virgin Mary picture with a corona that changes color,
deals with gods, the Electrolux canister vac.
—Mom and Dad snap matchsticks between their tender teeth
and I taste a green clock at the back of my throat.
The ticking is cold or sour or really a pickax.
Worry tastes so dirty when it’s spread out like a banquet.
—my brother the myrrh-eater—lost fucked-up Magus,
followed the wrong star—licking his sequined lips,
which can’t shine in the shade of this growing pyre.
—my dad sips gasoline through a green garden hose.
Siphons it from his own work truck so my brother can’t steal it.
—my mom tries to dress the place up: riddled doilies,
the burning-heart Jesus with eyes that used to follow us
around the room until someone plucked out each bright circle.
Now my fingers slip down into the slick holes in Jesus’s face.
—my mom can’t wash the windows because my brother ate them.
—she knots ribbons on the wood stack,
hangs blackened spoons like wind chimes and says,
What can you expect from a pyre but a pyre?
—when I visit, I hate searching for the door—usually
my brother’s boot print on my dad’s ribs, once it was
a hole in my mom’s chest that changed her into a sad guitar
for three years—these are more like exits than doors.
They are difficult to get through.
—the walls have been mortared with grief, dark enough
to make blindness a gift—we don’t have to look each other in the eyes.
—it’s crazy how loud it is inside a funeral pyre.
We don’t talk much. We can’t hear each other
over so much stumbling.
—when I do hear, the only thing my mom says is,
How much longer? I prefer that to what she wrote
in fluorescent paint on the ceiling last weekend:
What does he do with all the lightbulbs?
—we don’t talk about crystal meth in my parents’ house, particularly
since it’s been converted to a funeral pyre.
—my dad quit speaking long ago. He only sings these days,
not with words, rather with small strikes and sparks.
Those quick flashes of fire that seem to satisfy
my mother’s questions.
Formication
sensation of insects or snakes running over or into the skin
1. aka speed bumps
In the middle of Highway 95 I stopped my car
while a dark cloud of tarantulas migrated
out of the desert pulling themselves across the road—
an ebony lake of legs, black vessels launched to retrieve
something beautiful, they climbed the jagged wash
in such a way that I wondered if we were all living
