Brother Sleep Read online

  BROTHER

  SLEEP

  ALDO

  AMPARÁN

  © 2022 by Aldo Amparán

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.

  Alice James Books

  Auburn Hall, Suite 206

  60 Pineland Drive

  New Gloucester, ME 04260

  www.alicejamesbooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Amparán, Aldo, author.

  Title: Brother sleep / Aldo Amparán.

  Description: New Gloucester, ME : Alice James Books, 2022

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022012121 (print) | LCCN 2022012122 (ebook) ISBN 9781948579278 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781948579360 (epub)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.M725 B76 2022 (print) | LCC PS3601.M725 (ebook) DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20220328

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012121

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012122

  Alice James Books gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, private foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Amazon Literary Partnership. Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Cover art: “Variation 7” from Intimacy Hierarchies (The Annunciation) by Luis González Palma, inkjet print on watercolor paper

  CONTENTS

  Litany with Burning Fields

  1:

  Endings

  Aubade at the City of Change

  Interrogation of the Sodomite

  42

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Puñal

  Thanatophobia, or Sleep Addresses His Brother

  Banquet with Copper & Rust

  Inheritance

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Art

  Chronology with Little Deaths

  2:

  Imploded Villanelle

  Obituaries for the Unnamed

  Some Notes on Love

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Gaslight

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Border/Cities

  What I say to my mother after her father dies is soft

  I’m afraid doctors will tell me the MRI shows:

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Mad

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Loss

  Elegy with a Dial-Up Connection

  3:

  Sleep, Brother,

  Black Palace Blues

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Concave

  Misadventure

  What Light Wants

  Ghosting

  Los Olvidados

  Sinner

  Pentecost, 2006

  Genealogy

  Blue Insomnia

  4:

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Citizen

  Lullaby, after You Left the Immigrant Shelter

  Anti-Elegy in the Voice of Death

  Scrapbook for My Undoing

  The Day I Came Out

  Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Silencio

  5:

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Diagnosis)

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Desert)

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Dream)

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Sleep)

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Shore)

  Primer for a View of the Sea (Silt)

  &:

  This Room Will Still Exist

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  LITANY WITH BURNING FIELDS

  Let’s say Death only exists in this line.

  Let Sleep be an only child with a single mother: the dark

  & elegant moon

  dropping poppies into my yawn. In the dream

  I burn 600 acres & sprint across the flames

  unclothed. I turn out gilded.

  I wake up to my brother springing on my bed

  before dawn, my grandfather

  heating water in the wailing kettle. Again, say Death exists

  only in this line: a brother grows tumors in his throat, a grandfather dissolves

  into the soil of a churchyard. I admit: I’m in love

  with Sleep. Each morning:

  I wake up & a shovel caves the peak of my stomach; I wake up

  & dust varnishes my brother’s side

  of the bed; I wake up

  & a field is burning outside my window.

  1

  ENDINGS

  This morning I have fog for breakfast.

  A whole bank of it. Before sunrise.

  Plucked. From the corners of the mountain.

  & already I’m thinking about the end.

  Of the day. The sunbed unmade.

  The lull & the sex of a boy who reminds me.

  Of someone I’d rather keep. Unnamed.

  The headache after the orgasm. I’ve been.

  Thinking too much about my brother.

  Lately. Just how much. Of the day.

  He spent asleep before his end.

  As if the end. Devoured like voracious fog.

  The hours. He had left.

  On earth. I want. A different ending.

  Or rather a thing that doesn’t end.

  In heartache. Or headache. The sea.

  & the sun. For instance. The quiet. Nestle of clouds.

  Falling. Down the pits. Of my body.

  AUBADE AT THE CITY OF CHANGE

  In this city,

  each door I cross

  in search of your room

  grows darker

  than the sky, this silver

  dome of morning spread

  across the urban smog.

  Country dark washes the city

  light off the outskirts

  & beyond

  where you sleep in hiding,

  where your face

  wrapped in gauze

  shines like sequin

  in the lingering moon-drizzle.

  I reach for you

  at the corners of the clubs,

  inside motel rooms,

  where rent boys tumble

  perspired bedsheets,

  doubling you, your maleness

  discharged,

  your hip bones sticking

  to my thighs, hard

  stubble of your legs

  scratching. The night I followed

  a strange road, looking

  to forget all this, starlight

  spooled the gravel ribbon

  leading back to the city

  behind me, back

  to the hospital room

  where I last saw you—

  tonight, I’ll rest

  on this road. I’ll look back

  to the city of change

  where one year

  two skyscrapers lifted, a park

  shed trees

  for new thoroughfares,

  & an old cinema

  erupted to rebuild itself

  in its place. I’ll stay

  on the pavement,

  suspended in time

  like the broken sign announcing

  You are entering _________, (a name

  changed two years ago),

  & I’ll wonder

  if the hot breeze

  blowing the nape

  of my neck

  is your unchanged

  breath rising like candle

  smoke from the city.

  INTERROGATION OF THE SODOMITE

  In México City, in 1901, police detained 41 gay men at a dance. Many were imprisoned & subjected to labor. Since, in México, the number 41 has been used in jokes & derogatory remarks against gay men.

  There are currently six countries where the death penalty is used for people in same-sex relationships: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria & Somalia.

  1.

  Asked to remove my mask, I peeled off my face & let the world see

  2.

  Inside, a dark made of edges. Asked how I could look myself

  3.

  In the mirror, I stood before a lake for days, my tongue dry

  4.

  Stone. I drank all the water. Fish swam inside me

  5.

  For weeks. Tadpoles shot out my eyes in my sleep. Asked how I could dream

  6.

  Of men, their waltzing legs, the 41 sharp cheeks blushing in the candle

  7.

  -lit dark, in México, the 41 abdomens soaking a river with their shame

  8.

  -less loving, I bit out my tongue, which shot in its silence to bruise & bloody

  9.

  A loving

  10.

  Man’s forehead

  11.

  To death in Saudi Arabia today,

  12.

  Just for loving

  13.

  The dark

  14.

  Edges in men.

  42

  my name was

  candlelit

  smoke vanished

  in a man’s silent

  inhalation

  smoke held

  in the pueblo’s lungs

  I yearn

  to keep dancing

  in his breath

  GLOSSARY FOR WHAT YOU LEFT UNSAID: PUÑAL

  puñal, adj. desus.

  I hang at the back of the school ground, my fingers
/>
  hooked to the chain-link facing the street, tips white

  with my body’s weight. The oak tree behind me bends

  down further each day I visit to smear

  my mind on its bark. Armando walks

  by the basketball field, spots me. He’s surrounded

  by boys. He approaches, slow as a hyena & I stab

  the lonely tree with another question. Armando spits

  on the blacktop, yells Puñal—dagger,

  faggot, a word

  that doubles his voice. That deepens the space

  between two countries. This border separating

  him from the likes of me. Boys behind him

  whistle. They laugh. One of them stabs himself

  in the chest with an invisible knife: a gesture that echoes

  the word of my erasure. It’s afternoon. Early dark.

  & before them, the oak tree kneels a little lower.

  puñal1, m.

  In Ciudad Juárez, always, air tastes bitter with copper,

  Coins roll on the mouth, stick to the throats

  Of passers-by, hot air rusted & rustling

  As they push their way through the city. Downtown

  Another body drops on the tarmac—luminous, wet—

  His stomach decked with seven slashes

  The color of Venus, seven red

  Mouths speaking foreign tongues: how the boy walked

  Barefoot across La Mariscal, sidewalk broken

  Into beer bottles, how the boy walked, how

  His whole body waved that curious way & wore

  His blue hair down to his shoulders, his hair

  An oil slick in the concrete mouth of the alley.

  puñal2, m.

  When she learned I’d grow

  To love a man,

  My grandmother prayed

  Nine rosaries, the brown beads

  Digging the backs of her hands,

  New moles there for me not to end

  Like Erykah, in the El Paso

  Times, found

  By her stepfather in her apartment, her

  Torso bursting

  Apertures, 24

  Red orchids rising

  Out of her skin. I touched

  My grandmother’s back

  That night. I knelt

  Beside her, the evening news

  In the white background

  & her murmured faith

  Effacing each other

  Into noise.

  THANATOPHOBIA, OR SLEEP ADDRESSES HIS BROTHER

  No duerme nadie por el mundo.

  —Federico García Lorca

  Night: the world boils. Men

  toss sleepless

  in their sheets like stars.

  Because I look down

  where a man holds his only son

  among the spillage

  of buildings & children

  sitting on debris

  after the bombs

  cast their shadows

  onto stone. There the boy hangs

  from his father’s arm, his father’s hand

  folded to the open neck, & the open eyes

  like cold nickels look past me, past

  the white sheet of linen.

  How terrible

  the fabric that veils

  the end. How terrible

  the night for him, the sleepless,

  Brother. When an American soldier

  swallows a grenade which bursts

  as it slips down his throat, a Mexican

  immigrant, a woman beaten

  half to death for stealing

  a pomegranate, breaks

  the fruit’s skin open, red

  from her wounds

  like the inside of the fruit,

  or the inside of the soldier,

  & doctors put to sleep

  a girl to replace her heart with a new

  beating. Soon that artificial

  sleep turns the same terrible

  fabric. Her mother, quiet

  as a desert in the hall,

  admires Wojnarowicz’s Untitled

  (Buffalo), that great beast at the edge

  of the photograph suspended

  in air forever.

  & the girl’s father reaches

  her mother’s arm to keep her

  from plunging off the rooftop

  to fall into you,

  Brother. I know nothing

  but impermanent rest.

  How do you do it

  each time you take & take & wrap

  your permanence around

  sleep? Brother,

  you terrify me.

  You make my heart

  gallop like buffaloes

  in the white desert, their large bodies

  advancing their fall.

  BANQUET WITH COPPER & RUST

  I push two pennies

  into the slit of your eyelids

  for the ferryman

  I’ve been trying to let go

  of you tying a knot to my gullet

  to remember you

  without shedding—we eat

  hot porcelain in shards

  pick the splinters off

  our teeth with silverware

  our mother chokes

  on coins & rust

  varnishes her vocal cords

  I speak to her about my future

  children their recurring dream

  about the orchard

  where each tree sports

  a hanging: a dream

  knitted from the past

  or the near future

  what history

  unchanged—

  I don’t want Death

  to hang his shadow

  over my children

  but Brother what stories

  can I tell them of you?

  INHERITANCE

  Mother’s hair bundles

  in the sunken corner

  of the bathtub, is fed

  to the drain. Strands

  of her youth & her wish

  to preserve it. She extinguishes

  a candle with water, sizzle

  rising to my eardrum, says

  her scalp brimmed hair

  before my birth, calls me

  Ladronzuelo. She brushes

  the crown over my temples

  white with foam, washes

  my slight casket of flesh:

  growing organ, harvest

  of her body; this vessel

  she holds to the surface

  in time will shed

  a mountain of scabs, stale

  rivers of spit & urine,

  a dust storm of dead cells—

  bone spreading the tented

  meat of muscle

  & tendon, my skin

  unfurling like my mother’s

  hair into the gutter, organ

  of my heart speeding

  & slowing—I take

  my first step, ride

  my first bike, learn

  to drive a car, to crash

  into strangers

  ‘til they’re no longer

  strangers, & one

  night I’ll slip

  back into my family

  home, my own

  hair scarce, to bathe

  my mother & lift her

  in the blurring

  of her mind

  to the surface

  of hot water,

  to foam white her small

  crowning, to brush

  her shoulders

  between the spasms

  of her waking,

  her eyes

  watching me

  one more time

  before they sink

  to the black waters

  in her head.

  GLOSSARY FOR WHAT YOU LEFT UNSAID: ART

  art1, n.

  the boy keeps (to himself) in lunch periods, insidethe unstirred classroommaneuveringwet brushesover his off-white canvashe tints everything differentblues smears a (self-)portrait with drowned skinhe didn’t intend tolook this dead his eyes stitchedeverything wavering under waterwater-color his whole (self) a month before