Self-portrait as Frida Kahlo – by Katherine Brabon
RUNNER-UP IN THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2020/21
I tell her about Frida Kahlo her right leg thinner than the other my left leg
thinner than the other. A pebble of obsession in me a need for similarity of
any limb. The slow ebb circulation in her leg my knee is concrete I say
this my friend shifts one leg over the other. Frida saying I must have full
skirts and long, now that my sick leg is so ugly. I say my sick leg is so
ugly my sick leg is so ugly, says my friend.
I read that the living body is amenable to scrutiny causal explanation
therapeutic repair. The lived body pertains to subjectivity can only be
known to others if it expresses itself. In the same words: breathing is the
living body. The lived body is the metaphor the sigh interpreted. Would we
call this pain if we had no witnesses if we had not been taught the words.
Do we make these words so that we have a friend —
Tell me more about Frida says my friend. Well she learnt how to retouch
photographs with her father he taught her nature taught her books. She
was eighteen on a wooden bus with her boyfriend as it collided with a
metal streetcar a handrail pierced her pelvis fractured bone displaced
vertebrae. She wore a plaster corset Frida she became a statue. Sometimes
I am a statue a woman he lays on the bed as if cast out of Carrara. Just
imagine her Frida lying on her bed in her plaster mould, painting.
I tell her about all the metaphors. My friend and I walk in the park near the
Children’s Hospital. It is always a beautiful tree with rheumatism: the
magnolia, the money plant, the ginkgo with gnarled and twisted fingers,
arthritic wood. Why don’t they just write, the trees are my hands? Because
we are nothing outside of the body we can only be inside always inside the
things the words the everyday trees. My friend says show me your hands
show me your hands I say to her. We gather kindling.
I show my friend a photograph. Frida Kahlo Diego Rivera reclining
Coyoacán. Her legs bunched her finger loose with cigarette her face the
pain facade I know all the stampedes inside her the hooves in her gut the
plots in her eyebrows. Frida as painting: The Broken Column encased in a
metal corset fabric holds her body from collapse over her defiant stare
tears as though rain she’s determined to ignore this is me she says I paint me.
What else says my friend, what else about the corset. Well she began to
paint them her plaster corsets torso murals because we are nothing outside
of the body there is nowhere to go but this canvas. Diego her husband his
hands on her sometimes a hand, his fingers sometimes I forget what
pleasure is my friend says sometimes his fingers I have to say the words
pleasure pleasure. Frida always painted herself I tell my friend as she’s
crying and snapping ficus twigs in Royal Park don’t you forget that she
painted her own torso in brilliance in colour.
NOTE TO POEM:
In this poem, some phrases after ‘I read that’ quote Andrea Kottow and Michael Kottow, ‘The disease-subject as a subject of literature’, Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2 (2007), accessible online at peh-med.biomedcentral.com.
Image: Gabriella Clare Marino
This poem appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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