Drug Addiction
The central narrative line connecting much of these poems together—as indicated by the title—is the tragic story of the author’s brother. The speaker here is from the poem “When My Brother was an Aztec” but all of the second section’s poems are devoted to this story. His tragedy is a common one: lives destroyed by drug addiction. The drugs are here manifested in evocative metaphorical form. As is the effect upon his parents.
They fed him
crushed diamonds and fire. He gobbled the gifts. My parents
begged him to pluck their eyes out.
What is Love?
The tough quality of living within the confines of a Native American reservation is poignantly expressed in the late, after-the-fact lesson of maternal sacrifice delineated by the speaker in “Why I Hate Raisins.” The opening line foreshadows the closing revelation through metaphor:
“Love is a pound of sticky raisins
packed tight in black and white
government boxes the day we had no
groceries.”
The Human Head
The poem titled “Dome Riddle” is actually nothing but a litany of metaphors for the human head:
“sticky sweet guilt hive”
“memory grenade”
“Library of Babel”
“lamp illuminated by teeth”
Menstruation
“The Red Blues” is a poem about a young girl’s blossoming into woman via the less poetic reality of getting her period. The speaker reinterprets this biological reality back into the sphere of the poetic by beginning each new stanza with a simile that is a variation upon a theme:
“There is a dawn between my legs”
“There are bulls between my legs”
“There are car wrecks between my legs”
Addict Hell
The nightmarish poem “My Brother at 3 AM” is a snapshot of the horrific reality of drug abuse and its impact as it extends beyond the addict. Hell is represented through hopelessness, paranoia, images of the devil and repetition. The repetition is used to help instill the hellish weirdness of the moment as the following line occurs twice in the short verse:
“The sky wasn’t black or blue but the green of a dying night.”
