Shrine to Frida Kahlo
To your villa they come
the sketchbooks, the cameras
parade past your clay mugs and plates,
black lace mantillas that covered your legs,
white wooden bed where you slept,
naked art pressed to your breasts.
When the trolley shattered your hip,
dragged your straw-doll body across tracks,
you lay alone in his bed.
Against the grain of white headboard you sketched
blue doves with gold open beaks, gold-scalloped wings
that cluttered the doorways--wishes
through which early evenings Diego slipped
out to markets, cantinas, and trysts.
Your brushes were nipples,
his face ingrained on your palette
in every cracked mirror
in seeds of papaya and melon
in monkeys perched on your shoulders
in red ribbons tying your legs to his bed.
***
Crib Death
You call me Sundays,
your voice, a recorded message
that echoes down a narrow hallway--
“We got rain, the Olds leaks oil again.”
I bake, chew fingernails, fold laundry
to all the monologues I know by heart.
While I have spent the last eight years
sharpening pencils, writing to discover
who I want to be when I feel free
never a sister to a two-month-old
choking quietly into his pillow,
you have spent the last eight years
pricing lemons and tomatoes
stirring gallons of homemade gravy,
you have stitched a mile
of needlepoint yarn
into brown-nosed foxes
and purple pansies,
swallowed flask after flask
of pink and blue pills,
you keep phlegm
from choking you--
you cradle the pain,
hold it up to your face
like a favorite dress,
in a bedroom mirror
you check if pain still fits.
***
Waikiki
He gives you peridot on a golden chain--
a yellow-green flame or teardrop
that dangles around your heart, wear it
and it warms empty spaces
he promises to fill in summer’s lust,
wear it and you taste the kiwis and limes
of that summer when you feasted
on kiss, breath, and sigh,
when desire was a sorcerer that whipped you
when peridot was Waimea Valley
lily pads and minted voices soft under waterfalls
his laughter, wet and cool to your ear
wear it and you feel the gloss on menus
you circled in red,
messages you placed on trays behind closed doors
waiters who whispered,
when naked touches were living words under sheets
when every pore every nerve caressed
struck lightning rods to deep ground--
he wouldn’t leave you then
when peridot was the color of trust
more solid than mornings waking up with him,
a faith in yourself, that you could wear
his talisman around your throat, keep him forever.
They say green is the color of envy
a fevered anger when hands
no longer reach him if he is drifting,
then peridot is the color of hang-up calls
excuses and bickering., a sick yellow-green
you see from a terrace,
the oily lantern that flickered
while you were swimming in flames.
***
In the dust of red clay
Calle de los Muertos
I lie down, play dead.
You take my picture,
rubber soles spread
to the Polaroid lens,
Pyramid of the Moon
to my east shoulder,
Pyramid of the Sun
to my west.
My backbone presses dry earth
but then, their deerhide slippers pad,
through grass -- runners with fresh fish
from Veracruz ascend, jaguar-footed,
these narrow bleeding stone steps.
The feathered serpent dances,
a flick of priestly machete
in sunflash splits
a white-robed virgin's chest,
drums pound
at the base of my spine,
rain cheers.
Oh city of the gods feed me
worm of pulque
lining of cow's stomach
mold of huitlacoche,
take this red pumping heart,
its flower muscle my offering,
I dare not leave this altar
now that body and spirit
have suckled at
the lopped off teat of this pyramid.
***
Susan Zenker works for the SISD family literacy program after having lived in Connecticut, Boston, Mexico City, and Miami. Some of her poems are in The South Boston Literary Gazette, Latino Stuff Review, and The South Carolina Review. Two of her plays were presented in public readings at the Fox Fine Arts Theater and at the Chamizal Theater during UTEP's PlayWorks program.
