When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz Page 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