Summary

“My Brother at 3 A.M.” begins Section II with a return to the brother character of the opening poem, “When My Brother Was an Aztec.” In “My Brother at 3 A.M.,” the brother appears on his parents’ front steps at 3 A.M. He is on drugs, and when his mother answers the door, he says he is being chased by the devil, and that the devil wants to kill him. He describes the monster that is chasing him. At first, his mother thinks that he is raving, but as she listens to him, she looks at him and recognizes that the monster he is describing is himself.

“Zoology” is a fantastical prose poem where the father character brings a zebra home to the mother character, who says, “this house is a zoo,” (2) and cries until the painted-on stripes of the zebra wash off, revealing...