Frida Deserved Better Than Diego’s Coconut

Frida Deserved Better Than Diego’s Coconut

Weeping Coconuts

After Frida Kahlo

Like Jesus on toast,
or a ghostly woman
in pentimento,
if you strain your
imagination’s
eye you can find Frida
in her drupe, eyes wet
with milk for Diego.
It’d be best if you gloss over
the pun—lágrimas de coco,
tears of a croco-
dile—or the context—
how she painted
the bedridden
still life for a friend
who rejected the present.
The grim humor’s a painkiller
and the pivot from self-portraits
a deathbed crisis.
The other coconut is Diego—
you recognize
his hollow glance—
the parted papaya
a boat and the boat
is bound to sink.
You sigh—she would have been
better off with Bartoli,
that Catalan lover
you read about.
Their
correspondence sold recently
for over 100k,
and if you’d had that money
you too would have bid for
that auctioned intimacy,
comprado con todo cariño.

Figura Só

After Tarsila do Amaral

In the painting, the nightgown
contours her body like a pink urn.
You’d think her inanimate

if it weren’t for her bare feet peeking out
underneath, soles planted firmly on the grass,
and her nape, the vase’s loose lip,

exhaling a seamless puff of strawberry
blonde hair. I once compared life
to a water bottle. As with Tarsila’s woman-urn,

a pair of invisible hands uncap
your life-stuff, expose it
to the world, except with the bottle

there’s a risk said god will guzzle
you down after a hearty meal.
If I could choose now, I’d be a thurible

because I like the tether
of utility. I’d like to be handled
through Midnight Mass, a swung

pendulum, and reignited
whenever the ceremony calls for it.
After the offertory,

after the choir’s last note,
I’ll linger, a silent prayer,
go out in burnt
frankincense

and charcoal.