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

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 yours—
    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.

Love Potion 2012

    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 floor—

    Patellae shifting like dandelion seed A Halloween mask
    of pelvic bone roams a neighborhood in a dream Silvered
    horseshoes of mandibles canter spitting sand

    â€”tumbling skeletons of magnolia petals smitten by July
    wind—

    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

A Wild Life Zoo

    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 it—
    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 lion—
    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 shorts—to rescue the man who was crumpled on the floor like a red dress that had too many drinks—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