When My Brother Was an Aztec

by Natalie Diaz

  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 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 of my torso, zoo of canines and Blake’s tygers,

  this red-skinned apple, lamp illuminated by teeth, gang of grin, spitwad of scheme,

  this jawbone of an ass, smiling sliver of smite, David’s rock striking the Goliath of my body,

  this Library of Babel, homegrown Golgotha, nostalgia menagerie, melon festival,

  this language mausoleum: chuksanych iraavtahanm, ’avi kwa’anyay, sumach nyamasav,

  this hidden glacier hungry for a taste of titanic flesh,

  this pleasure altar, French-kiss sweatshop, abacus of one-night stands, hippocampus whorehouse, oubliette of regret,

  this church of tongue, chapel of vengeance, cathedral of thought, bone dome of despair, plaza del toro y pensamientos,

  this museum of tribal dentistry, commodity cranium cupboard, petrified dream catcher,

  this sun-ruined basketball I haul—rotted gray along the seams—perpetual missed shot,

  this insomnia podium, little bowl in a big fish, brain amphitheater, girl in the moon,

  this 3 a.m. war bell, duende vision prison,

  this single-scoop vanilla head rush, thunder head, fastball, lightning rod,

  this mad scientist in a white lab helmet, ghost of Smoking Mirror,

  this coyote beacon, calcium corral of pale perlino ponies,

  this desert seed I am root to, night-blooming cereus, gourd gone rattle,

  this Halloween crown, hat rack, worry contraption, Rimbaud’s drunken boat, blazing chandelier, casa de relámpago,

  this coliseum venatio: Borges’s other tiger licking the empty shell of Lorca’s white tortuga,

  this underdressed godhead, forever-hatching egg, this mug again and again at my lips,

  and all this because tonight I imagined you sleeping with her

  the way we once slept—as intimate as a jaw, maxilla and mandible hot,

  in the skin—in love, our heads almost touching.

  I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table

  While she sleeps, I paint

  Valencia oranges across her skin,

  seven times the color orange,

  a bright tree glittering the limestone grotto of her clavicle—

  heaving bonfires pulsing each pale limb

  like Nero’s condemned heretics sparking along Via Appia.

  A small stream of Prussian blue I’ve trickled

  down her bicep. A fat red nasturtium

  eddies her inner elbow.

  Against her swollen palms,

  I’ve brushed glowing halves of avocados

  lamping like bell-hipped women in ecstasy.

  A wounded Saint Teresa sketched to each breast.

  Her navel is a charcoal bowl of figs,

  all stem
thick with sour milk and gowned

  in taffeta the color of bruises.

  This to offer up with our flophouse prayers—

  God created us with absence

  in our hands, but we will not return that way.

  Not now, when we are both so capable of growing full

  on banquets embroidered by Lorca’s gypsy nun.

  She sleeps, gone to the needle’s gentle rocking,

  and I lean out the window, a Horus

  drunk on my own scent

  and midnight’s slow drip of stars.

  She has always been more orchard than loved,

  I, more bite than mouth.

  So much is empty in this hour—

  the spoon, still warm, lost in the sheets,

  the candle’s yellow-white thorn of flame,

  a vanishing ribbon of jade smoke,

  and night, open as autumn’s unfilled basket

  as the locusts feast the field.

  Monday Aubade

  with a line from Rimbaud

  To be next to you again,

  to feel the knob of your pelvic bone,

  the door of your hip opening

  to a room of light

  where a fuchsia blouse hangs

  in the closet of a conch shell,

  the silhouette of a single red-mouthed bell;

  to shut my eyes one more night

  on the delta of shadows

  between your shoulder blades—

  mysterious wings tethered inside

  the pale cage of your body—run through

  by Lorca’s horn of moonlight,

  strange unicorn loose along the dim streets

  separating our skins;

  to be still again knowing

  the bow of your spine, the arc of your torso—

  a widening road to an alabaster mountain,

  a secret path to a cliff overlooking a sea

  salt-heavy and laced in foam, a caravel

  crushing the swells, parting each

  like blue-skirted thighs—lay before me,

  another New World shore the gods

  have chained me to;

  to have you a last time, at last, a touch away,

  but then, to not reach out

  because my hands are dressed in scarves of smoke;

  to lie silent at your side,

  an ember more brilliant with each yellow breath,

  glowing and dying and dying again,

  dreaming a mesquite forest I once stripped to fire

  before the sky went ash, undid its dark ribbons,

  and bent to the ground, grief-ruined,

  as I watch you from the window—

  in this city, the city of you, where I am a beggar—

  the Dawns are heartbreaking.

  When the Beloved Asks, “What Would You Do if You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?”

  My lover doesn’t realize that I’ve contemplated this scenario,

  fingered it like the smooth inner iridescence of a nautilus shell

  in the shadow-long waters of many 2 a.m.s—drunk on the brine

  of shoulder blades, those pale horns of shore I am wrecked upon,

  my mind treading the wine-dark waves of luxuria’s tempests—

  as a matter of preparedness, and because I do not sleep for fear

  of such things or even other things—I’ve read that the ocean

  is a large pot of Apocalypse soup soon to boil over with our sins—

  but a thing is a thing, especially if it’s a 420-million-year-old beast,

  especially if you have wronged so many as I. Beauty, it is simple,

  more simple than a beloved can imagine: I wouldn’t fight, not kick,

  flail, not carry on like one driven mad by the black neoprene wetsuit

  of death, not like sad-mouthed, despair-eyed albacore or blubbery

  pinnipeds, wouldn’t rage the city’s flickering streets of ampullae

  of Lorenzini, nor slug my ferocious, streamlined lover’s titanium

  white nose, that bull’s-eye of cartilage, no, I wouldn’t prolong it.

  Instead, I’d place my head onto that dark altar of jaws, prostrated

  pilgrim at Melville’s glittering gates, climb into that mysterious

  window starred with teeth—the one lit room in the charnel house.

  I, at once mariner, at once pirate, would navigate my want by those

  throbbing constellations. I’d wear those jaws like a toothy cilice,

  slip into the glitzy red gown of penance, and it would be no different

  from what I do each day—voyaging the salt-sharp sea of your body,

  sometimes mooring the ports or sighting the sextant, then mending

  the purple sails and hoisting the masts before being bound to them.

  Be-loved, is loved, what you cannot know is I am overboard for this

  metamorphosis, ready to be raptured to that mouth, reduced to a swell

  of wet clothes, as you roll back your eyes and drag me into the fathoms.

  Lorca’s Red Dresses

  Tonight, after reading Lorca’s Cante jondo, I’m ready, dressed

  for the procession, for Jesus’s wounds, the mob’s red dresses.

  The Gitana’s savage hair charges the night, nocturno de guerra, battle-

  field of a thousand and one bulls. Their weapons: violent red dresses.

  Santa Teresa, torera, sacrificed her body to the pale horns. A First

  Confession: the split fruit made my thighs buck under my red dress.

  What hips! Péndulos. And breasts! Clocks adorning the dim hall-

  ways of kiss—there is chiming and hands beneath the red dress.

  Men crouch, crotches tremulous in the creaking ribcage of a horse.

  Who hasn’t beat at the gates of Troy for a taste of Helen’s red dress?

  Cherries dazzle the branches, merciless vermilion gods.

  My tongue’s a heretic, prostrated. My heart’s a red dress.

  El colibrí atormentado thrummed honeysuckle’s orange guitar to inferno.

  Azaleas wept jealously, bruised knees mourning September’s red dresses.

  The soldiers’ guns were blue tapers. An olive tree, a requiem. Silver

  flies riddled the sky. Three men and a poet slept hard in red dresses.

  Yesterday’s pains scar over. The body is canvas—Picasso’s

  Guernica: open palms, questions, the lamp’s faded red dress.

  We are black poplars at the foot of Sacromonte. They mistake

  salt for azúcar, these ants devouring us like magic red dresses.

  India, give in to the shells chafing your shadowy thighs and belly

  while Lucía Martínez builds your evening pyre, your final red dress.

  Of Course She Looked Back

  You would have, too.

  From that distance the shivering city

  fit in the palm of her hand

  like she owned it.

  She could’ve blown the whole thing—

  markets, dance halls, hookah bars—

  sent the city and its hundred harems

  tumbling across the desert

  like a kiss. She had to look back.

  When she did she saw

  pigeons glinting like debris above

  ruined rooftops. Towers swaying.

  Women in broken skirts

  strewn along burned-out streets

  like busted red bells.

  The noise was something else—

  dogs wept, roosters howled, children

  and guitars popped like kernels of corn

  feeding the twisting blaze.

  She wondered had she unplugged

  the coffeepot? The iron?

  Was the oven off?

  Her husband uttered, Keep going.

  Whispered, Stay the course, or

  Baby, forget about it. She couldn’t.

  Now a bursting garden of fire

  the city bloomed to f
lame after flame

  like hot fruit in a persimmon orchard.

  Someone thirsty asked for water.

  Someone scared asked to pray.

  Her daughters or the crooked-legged angel,

  maybe. Dark thighs of smoke opened

  to the sky. She meant to look

  away, but the sting in her eyes,

  the taste devouring her tongue,

  and the neighbors begging her name.

  Apotheosis of Kiss

  I dipped my fingers in the candle wax at church—

  white votives shivered in red glass

  at the foot of la Virgen’s gown—

  glowing green-gold.

  The fever was fast—

  my body ablaze,

  I pulled back.

  Pale silk curved on each fingertip—

  peeling it away was like small gasps.

  The candles flickered—

  open mouths begging.

  Heretics banged at the double door.

  Charismatics paraded the aisles,

  twirling tapers, flinging Sunday hats.