“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo
I post one
with its age spots
and sepia tones.
You are beautiful, friends say
who haven’t seen me in 30 years.
A“Like” doesn’t begin
to do you justice.
I study the woman staring back,
wondering why she left
dark caterpillars inching
over dark eyes, and pulled
jaunty hair back, leaving
her middle-aged face
unadorned, a look her mother
might have called severe.
Then cut the hair she loved
after she fell
and could no longer walk correctly.
I know why Frida
pulled her hair back,
why she chose
the black button-down,
the tarnished necklace
with fetish medallions,
the dark smirk armoring her
against the next something
going wrong.
We look into a mirror
and see ourselves, one rent
from the rocky Coyoacan clay,
Diego’s X-ACTO knives and detailing tools,
the pains in her ruined spine;
the other from a wheel and buck,
each moment, another sob
splashed onto canvas and page
envisioned from our sick beds.
Notice the mouths
with almost perfect lips
(so Diego once said)
glistening still,
as her father behind his 35mm Black Eye,
and my husband behind his IPhone
advise us to Lick them again.
Julia Wendell’s newest collection of poems is Take This Spoon, which appeared from Main Street Rag Press in 2014. She is finishing up a memoir, “Come to the X,” which is a sequel to Finding My Distance (Galileo Press, 2009). When she’s not writing, she is usually either playing the piano or riding.
Send one poem or short prose piece, to rabble.editor@yahoo.com, with the heading RADICAL ROMANCE: [your title]. We can’t wait to read your submissions!
Header Image: Detail from “Las dos Fridas,” Frida Kahlo, 1939.
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