You saw the red strings that bind us
to our losses. Bleeding into the mattress
at Henry Ford Hospital in 1932,
you saw the cords anchoring the many
shapes of your dear one, your wanted one,
your little Dieguito, to your belly—
wilted orchid, machine and snail,
broken pelvis, male fetus in full lotus—
all tethered to your body like terrible kites.
Frida, I have kites of my own—a fox, a flame,
stone eggshells, milk ducts filled with scorpions
and quicksand. I know those threads
cannot be severed. We will drag our nevers
from the tarnished bed frame into the desert,
into the factory smoke and barren fields. No one
will touch them. No one will notice the red trails
they cut in the dust. For us, the morning sky
will always be flecked with their blood.
As you said, It’s over, there is nothing else
that can be done except to bear it. We will bury
their names under our tongues for safekeeping.
We will paint their shadows on tin. When we try
to speak of them, it will sound like water,
like static, like a moonflower slamming shut.
This poem first appeared in Mid-American Review as “Open Letter to Frida Kahlo.” Thanks to Mark Wagenaar for selecting it as the winner of the 2020 James Wright Poetry Prize.
“Open Letter to Frida Kahlo” is a poem charged with poignant details and surreal figurative language: “your little Dieguito, to your belly— // wilted orchid, machine and snail….tethered to your body like terrible kites.” It’s a poem that swerves from 1932 into the present, from the third person into the first, where the youngest lives are nonetheless touched by the mortal. This is an unsparing, unsentimental poem, even as it memorializes the dead in a landscape of smokestacks and infertile fields, binding Kahlo and the speaker through circumstance and anaphora, a poem of dreams and possible futures rooted in loss and the indomitable need to remember, and bookended by the haunting imagery of red strings and red trails in the desert: “We will drag our nevers / from the tarnished bed frame into the desert, / into the factory smoke and barren fields. No one // will touch them. No one will notice the red trails / they cut in the dust.”
—Mark Wagenaar
Sarah Burke 