Frida Kahlo Takes a Rib from Diego Rivera

and picks it clean to the bone. She licks her lovely lips
and grins. Frida rubs her knees like rosary beads
until they bleed and prays at the edge of her own
clitoris. The red baying of her body is the only thing
she submits to, listen: a woman’s howl claws through
her stomach like baby teeth through mango skin.
Frida, your hands are softer than you’d like.
Forgive your body for being beautiful. Let me eulogize
the small of your back by saying there are few things
more glorious than that two inch expanse of exposed skin,
Frida you make my Sunday confessions so lovely. Father forgive
me, her lips landed like angels at the second coming: mercifully,
impossibly warm. Frida. Your blue house, your pink insides,
the acidity of your breath. What I would have done to be the air
in your lungs. What I would have done to be the slight headache
between your eyes. Frida, I love a woman who loves a woman.
Your blood is the only promise I intend to keep. Frida, I’ve
seen myself die a thousand times but not you. You live in the
soft heat of Mexico city, the hidden accent of my grandmother,
her gap teeth, and me, my small shoulders standing in
front of the mirror trying to love myself into a woman. You,
the mirror as well as the body. When I first learned spanish,
I’d confuse hunger and man. Frida, with you, never again.
You smell like old roses and desert. You tell me all the nothing
promises to heaven. You kiss me and lie there picking at your hands.
The blood falls like a miracle. Night curls over us & keeps our secrets.
You: the secret and the keeping.

Mia Nelson is a high school senior from Colorado, where she attends Denver School of the Arts. Her writing has been recognized by the Foyle Young Poets Prize, Hollins University, Columbia College, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Never Such in Innocence Poetry Prize, Stories on Stage, Hippocrates Prize for Poetry, the Claudia Ann Seaman Award for Fiction, & Princeton University. She has work published in YARN, Calliope, Crashtest, Cadaverine and Canvas Literary Journal. She is also a Denver Public Schools Slam Poetry Competition winner as well as a qualifier for the Denver youth slam poetry team Minor Disturbance. Her poetry has been recently nominated for a 2017 pushcart prize.