by Andrew Perez
It is a twitch. A scratching on the arm. Hairs rising like the temperature of a feverish body. Hallucinations passing in and out— of sensation, perception, and right mind. It is “My Brother at 3 A.M.”: a harrowing pantoum of drug dependency that is emblematic of Diaz’s endeavors to marry language back to the bodies that emit it.
The speaker emphasizes the symptoms of her brother lips “flickered with sores” to illustrate the bodily effects of cocaine or methamphetamine use while roping language back to the flick of a lighter’s wheel to consume these drugs. The imagery of the intermittent flashing of the lighter underscores the brevity of the brother’s high and the lasting sores that litter his mouth and lips. Diaz does not make prey of addiction to nostalgia or glorification, but represents uneasy truth through memory by using the body as a recorder.
Even the “flickered” layout of these sores on the body point back to the hurried and broken lamentations of the brother shouting “O God…O God…he wants to kill me” numerous times throughout the poem. The repeating lines of the pantoum are a perfect textual analogue to the scattered thoughts of an addict losing control, as it creates a circular cadence that prioritizes the repetition of previous lines. Readers are no longer witnesses, if Diaz’s return to the body is to be practiced, but interactive entities that touch and strike language rather than simply observing the addiction of the speaker’s brother.
The eyes grab and struggle with lines that narrow from short, connected clauses to the shrunk murmurings of the dialogue in the poem. This handling of lexicon allows readers to understand recovering addicts in a way that exceeds empathy into a happening— a physical experience that cannot be taken away by a controlling language which seeks to inhibit memory.
Introduction to Poetry 