Three Poems
Photograph of Frida Kahlo sin Aderezos, 1946, by Antonio Kahlo
After surgery, her body weighted against
a wooden chair, eyes mid-blink, her face
curtained by a dark mass of hair, Frida lets
out curls of smoke from the left hand’s cigarette.
Her body shrinking back into its black pajamas,
her hair not bound up by braids or
Diego. There is no room
for anything else but Pain, which carries
inside it other pain and those pain’s
brothers, sisters, their spouses,
lovers, and children, on their
knees crawling to the church
of her body, its long
calzada. The steelbar
through the hip and uterus of it,
the streetcar sitting
on the column of the spine of it.
Pain is different
people, sitting by the bedside
but wringing its hands just the same,
figuring out what to take of the body
this time, what language
it can speak. Polio to steal a bit of leg,
the abortion, a toe and the body’s
fetus. A hand to infect, a leg
to gangrene and fell.
Behind her, inside the house
are dahlias, bougainvillaea,
gardenias, which she will paint
so they will not die, those
blooms waiting to be laureled
on the head, held up by its long
brown braid, tightly laced.
In this, she will hold up
cielito lindo, its
smuggled ribbons
of little sky,
folded up
in canta, no llores,
pin them
to her crown.
Come and Take It
From a slogan on a flag that started the Texas Revolution
Come and take it,
this suit of a body
its machine and wheels of
pain and knotted joy, running
down this runway of break
and sores and cysts and
infections and hurt
and hurt. Suit
of twists and branches jutting
into treebody, treehair, tree
hands of bark and moss, always
planted and reaching its scratchy
limbs away from itself, this body-not-
body. Try it on, put it in
your death-grip, this coming-and-going-away
suit,
its white flag of hair
that hangs and hangs.
I am not afraid of you
on my doorstep,
rubbing against my front door
like a stray cat, pretending
you are Elijah. I’m leaving
my door open because I know
you will not pass over, no
blood on the doorpost will
send you away. You came
because you smelled
me.
Fear
is melting into
milk that I feed you
and you lap me up with a greedy
unsatiated tongue, the kind
of hunger I know that laps
and laps. I have fed
myself to others before,
laid out like plate of feast. I will do it
again. Come,
take this broken wrist healed back
into stiff, motion-restrained bone, these swollen knees,
see how this tastes to you,
this hunger for what’s torn. It looks
the same, no matter
what plate on which
its served: naked, its cornucopia
of flesh-plump fruit, that ripened peach bursting
out of its skin, that bright hurt.
Isn’t that what you came for, Death,
to taste my life with a longing
that never stops.
The Lovesong of an Ovarian Cyst
Potential held
still in my womb,
that quiet fist-of-hearts
its dark & infernal glow.
Quis hic locus?, Quae regio?, Quae mundi plaga?
Where you clutch onto me,
growing hair,
skin, and teeth.
When you bleed,
I remember days
of turning away from
mirrors,
barely able to walk
through the school
doors, sore
and sorrow between
my legs. You remember
this for me,
that bleeding
that has never stopped
that song you remember
held caught in the throat:
to be something else,
anything but this orb
of captivity, of possibility
held in a body’s tight
grip.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a poet and essayist from Houston, Texas. She is the author of the poetry collection Fuego (Saint Julian Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in recently in The Collagist, Tap Literary Journal, Storyscape Literary Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her personal essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, Houston Chronicle, The Toast, Ozy, and Dame Magazine. She holds an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a BA in English from Rice University.