Read When My Brother Was an Aztec for Free Online Page B

whisper,
    already hard, with thoughts of what you will love
    into blaze tonight—
que amas
—
    already ash. Come morning the fields too will go
    to smoke. Now, the lamp-lit moths tremble,
    no longer themselves, gleaming with sex. You,
    your bare foot, slicing through the city
    dark as a scythe.

Black Magic Brother

    My brother’s shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician’s cape.
    My personal charlatan glittering in woofle dust and loaded
    with gimmicks and gaffs.

    A train of dirty cabooses, of once-beautiful girls,
    follows my magus man like a chewed tail
    helping him perform his tricks.
    He calls them his
Beloveds,
his
Sim Sala Bimbos,
juggles them,
    shoves them into pipes packed hot hard as cannons and
Wham Bam
    Ala-Kazam!
whirls them to smoke.
    Sometimes he vanishes their teeth then points his broken wand up
    into the starry desert sky, says,
Voilà! There they are!
    and the girls giggle, revealing neon gums and purple throats.

    My brother. My
mago
.
    The consummate professional, he is dependable—performs daily,
    nightly, in the living room, a forever-matinee, an always-late-shaman-show:
    Come one, come all! Behold the spectacle
    of the Prince of Prestidigitators
.

    As the main attraction (
drumroll please
) he pulls animals from a hole
    in his crotch—
    you thought I’d say
hat,
but you don’t know my black magic brother—
    and those animals love him like the first animals loved God
    when He gave them names.

    My brother. Our perpetual encore—
    he riddles my father with red silk scarves before sawing him in half
    with a steak knife. Now we have two fathers,
    one who weeps anytime he hears the word
Presto!
    The other who drags his feet down the hall at night.
    Neither has the stomach for steak anymore.

    My mother, too, is gone somewhere
    in one of the pockets of my brother’s bluest tuxedo:
    Abracadabrantesque!

    The audience is we—we have the stubs to prove it—
    and we have been here for years, in velvet chairs the color of wounds,
    waiting for something to fall,
    maybe the curtain, maybe the crucifix on the wall,
    or, maybe the pretty white doves my brother made disappear—
    Now we see them, now we don’t
—
    will fall from his sleeves like angels—
    right before our very eyes.

A Brother Named Gethsemane

    Naked blue boy put down your pipe. They found your shoes in the meadow. Mom’s and Dad’s hearts are overripe.

    Pluck that crimson orb rusted package from the branches mother’s arms our tree you’ve chopped away at for too long with your mouth-bright ax pretty-teethed boy. Chop chop-ping. No stopping this Lost-boy-of-our-wilting-garden. Peter Pan wannabe. Peter be wanna pan. Oh don’t grow up now. Don’t turn away from the gapings on Mama’s trunk. Watch them glow with us electric gashes wounds like hurt-lanterns you’ve lit. Sit Indian-legged under this moon. Hurtling shiny bullet. Hungry boy. Licking your ruby-crusted lips. Fingerpicking father’s red-swelled eyes from where he cowers. A beat bush smoldering with shame. Old men should be allowed to sob in privacy. Turn up the radio. Tune in to the border stations those pirate Mexican heroin melodies. We’ve got to got to got to get back to that stinking garden.

    Flyblown figs shimmer at you my bug-eyed boy. The glitzy-bodied flies boogie-woogie to your static grin numbing you while sexy screwworms empty you like a black hole. Ecstasy that must look pretty from inside—to core not just an apple but the entire orchard the family even the dog. Leave the shells to the crows. A field of red lampshades in the dark Garden of Myiasis. This is no cultivated haven. This is the earth riddled with a brother. The furrows are mountains. Waves of sand and we are ships wrecked. What’s left of a fleet of one hundred shadows shattered and bleached. A crop gone to sticks. The honeysuckle sags with bright sour powder. We have followed the flames