Addiction to the Dead
By Margo Tamez
I lift my body one leg then another over the cold curve of
the claw-foot tub
Like a walking stick with a colossal cocoon attached
A beast and a mutant I am this
Hooked on the steam of hot water I
Negotiate stretched skin a sore spine the splitting of imminent birth
What do you want
Mammoth a domemoon stomach
Carved by spidery trails former settlement
You in there baby think you’re ready for this
Sing soprano notes sing sounds of upness
Says the midwife
She says go ahead smoke some marijuana you see she’s our
motherherb sacred medicine not for foolery and
selfishness never to be used in that other way you know
she works deeply niece can take care those injuries
bad mister wrecks he set snaring you
this medicine will show you the things killing
all of us
----------
This is what’s necessary I sustain you
You are not ready for me what is out here
Cruel minds separate small girls from girlhood
Fists pound your brother’s brains through the wall
Yellowdrunk eyes from a failed mind lick every pair of
Breasts in the room
At home the smoke shop the wake the burial the ceremony the
Indian-taco stand—
I’m done
----------
Just keep sleeping on my mucous pillow
And don’t push on me
O pouring bowls of light
I see the horrific truths
The most beautiful lie
Will never fool
Never fool
Never fool
The fool
----------
What will be the venting of this
Where will we be
How will the vault be lifted
A tinny sound the drip of persistence
Water into water looking for its level
Always seeking level
No more a drip now a stream continuous motion
Unified atoms
Pearls cells threads cries
The house and early night are each black and black
One a lonesome gaping mouth the other a safe place
To plan
The real fact of spirit leaving body
----------
You push to be born fully alive
You press my addiction to the dead world
Birth me out a muse
----------
Ancestors glide
Landing on the levee where the DDT petroleum and tobacco
Burned my grandfathers’s flesh Emiliano and fueled
My mother’s resistance Chata
Ancestors scold me the lanky child running through
Glossy fields
Crabgrass Indian gum plants johnsongrass
Waxy from spraying the continuous spraying
O freedom of the green revolution O postwar
Stockpiles
O fucking inheritance of the ethnic poor
O how we’ve been fucked
----------
I go through the window opening after opening
Memory buried upon memory that’s how this appears
Skins burst unseam and inside these is me
A skinny dark girl with a dark brain and a dark mind
Seeking the deja-vu Zone of Time Flow
Outside of fear
O no one can see me or see what is real
The invasive spray seeping
Follows me and flows in my blood through decades
To my room and the ease of dark and sleep
Dreaming how I’ll wage war on my raiders
O settlers of the empire
O land thieves
O scalpers of my grandfathers
O slave traders of my grandmothers
Books stand like enemies
Rapists who’ll conspire to kill me
They wrestle me I wrestle back kicking their spines
Splitting their black seeds with my knife the little
Black letters ejaculate from
Their splintered and crushed chaff
My uterus stops the surging jolt of you kicking
You will not miscarry
Not one more
Not ever again
Copyright Credit: Margo Tamez, “Addiction to the Dead” from Raven Eye. Copyright © 2007 by Margo Tamez. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.
Source: Raven Eye (University of Arizona Press, 2007)