Frida Kahlo Takes a Muse in Detroit

                after her smallest self-portrait

by Alyssa Jewell

                                                                    The stillness that precedes the coming of light was everywhere—Felix Salten

1.

And I was only half in this life, withered beneath the stink
of sour milk mop, legs like paperclips unwound then bound
into sculpture: a brass tree rooted to the kitchen table, branched hands
arced beyond a milk saucer skyline bent of plaster. But the truth is,
had you been next to me all along, I’d have stretched green and peach plum pear
beautiful, round hayfield, and moon-drenched lovely for you.
I’d be the keeper of the dew and kick down the frost.

2.

You on ladders, you finding balance on the highest branch thick
with apples tumbling like red stones into buckets—I saw you there
speaking in a language only I could hear and wondered
who you’d feed with all that sugar in your hands. Would you toss
a layer of flesh to the evening sidewalk to lighten your load, then shake
October’s dust and the horizon’s naked trees from your shoulders
before going home? O my hunger, little greed to green my copper toes.

3.

I’d hide my bus-wrecked bones for you, shattered pelvis out of frame
and only reveal stars for eyes sly and brighter in the darkest part
of the landscape as if to say, there’s a whole drawbridge left to unhinge
in the corner of my mouth, point of vanishing, point of the holy unspoken and no
return. Jean Harlow and all her angels couldn’t sing to me tonight, couldn’t
bring back the kidnapped or the dead or the nipped with a knife. My skull
beats with shadows and light, the concentric blooms of a conch shell winding off the page.