Today's poem is by Laura Isabela Amsel

Still Life with Frida Kahlo
       

In the bowl, cobalt-blue, you
collect each spilled pebble,
imposing order against his going.

On the table, stacked just so—
Mandelstam, Hopkins, Plath,
antlers and a heron's hollow bone.

Through the door he did not close,
in September wind, switch-grass shivers
like the tich-tich of a reed-thatched roof.

Its seed-head plumes nod and shake—
first believing, then refusing to believe.
You stroke ridges of the empty

tortoise shell, patchwork gray,
the vase, its stiff, ceramic flounces,
a flamenco dancer's traje de gitana,

and press your thumb against the jade
plant's spikes until blood replaces numb.
From the book-cover, Frida glares at you—

her single brow, her eyes sparsely lashed,
anguished but defiant, her frown,
mustached, pursed and pouted.

She has divorced Rivera, El Gordo,
and from her web of thorny necklace dangles,
dead, a hummingbird. On her back,

a cat, a spider monkey, both coal-
black. You dreamed him last night
into that tom you fed for years

that wandered, slunk home, starving.
Circling your ankles, black back arched,
round your calves, he curled his tendril-tail,

twisted himself between your legs,
bunted his sorry head against your hand,
then marked you with his musky scent.

Cold blue eyes and flattened ears
like Kahlo's cat, beneath the yellow porch-lamp
he pleaded, yowling for your scraps.

Copyright © 2024 Laura Isabela Amsel All rights reserved
from A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet
Brick Road Poetry Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission