To
strip this painting to its core
I
flip the love plant
upside-down, release
a starburst of stamens and stigma –
insecticide yellow
to
ward off scorpions
from
our marriage bed.
And around the ruby
mandragora
I let the rosette of leaves
bare their petticoats –
the
business of what’s inside
and under
the fireworks.
Is
that an embryo’s fontanelles
in
the velvet urn
or
Diego’s fountain-flower?
It
isn’t roots someone’s pulled
shrieking out of the ground,
but
my torn fallopian tubes.
Memory I
after Frida
Kahlo
Since I was six my right foot
has been
bandaged in a boat.
But
it’s only today that the doctors
add a toy
sail and smash
a tequila
bottle against it
to
launch me on my ocean of tears.
Memory II
after Frida Kahlo
Isn’t it enough that I’ve yanked out my
heart?
That
there’s a gaping hole in my chest
my
finest brushes worry?
So why
does the sword of my eyes
pierce the wound? And why do I have to
paint
two tiny
cupids,
one
each end of the shaft,
see-sawing up and down until the
creaking
echoes in my deserted house
like
a couple’s bedsprings?
Memory III
after
Frida Kahlo
I
stand between the sea and the mountains,
one foot
on land, one on water,
among my dresses lowered from the clouds
on red
veins.
The
sky’s wardrobe is open, the mirror of twilight
shivers
with stars where seamstresses
quickly sew, snipping each thread
with
haemostatic scissors.
And
just as night falls, my school uniform
and
Tehuana gown each offer me an arm.
And
as we walk
they
speak in silk and velvet voices –
rustles from the cloth of memory.
They
bring me the scents of childhood,
those seraphim-skirts and blouses –
blow
me right back to the day I was whole.
Roots
after
Frida Kahlo
I’ve come to lie on the basalt
plain
where the
earth is trying to heal itself.
I look down a crack in the
mantle
when the
pain gets white, keep looking
until my
chest blisters. And right down
against a roiling valve
beating like a heart
until my
own heart bubbles.
This is what I have to do. Then my
body
empties. The threads of my dress
spit and
snarl. I soothe them.
I calm sun flares, plasma
storms.
And on
the cloth of fire I paint vines.
They
shoot out from my hollows –
leaves large as hands
that stroke the wound of my
land.
