Read When My Brother Was an Aztec for Free Online

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

    â€”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.

    â€”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.

    â€”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.

    â€” it’s hard to visit.

    â€”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…

    â€¦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.

    â€”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.

    â€”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.

    â€”my dad sips gasoline through a green garden hose.
    Siphons it from his own work truck so my brother can’t steal it.

    â€”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.

    â€”my mom can’t wash the windows because my brother ate them.

    â€”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?

    â€”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.

    â€”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.

    â€”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.

    â€”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?
    â€”we don’t talk about crystal meth in my parents’ house, particularly
    since it’s been converted to a funeral pyre.

    â€”my dad quit speaking long ago. He only sings these days,
    not with words, rather with small