Self-Portrait as Frida Kahlo in a Velvet Dress

The proportions are wrong on purpose, hand

a luminescent boat on a black sea. It could carry

a body out to open water, fill the pockets 

with stones, pitch sideways so the fall is just

another swell. The surprise is finding 

motion in a fuse of legs, a corset 

growing buoyant, flexing its skin 

like a sine wave, drilling down to the twin wrecks 

of before and after. I trace their gunwales 

with a finger, knot their masts together with the eel 

of a throat, the zip tie of a sister-self, self-lit, singing 

her low rumble of metaphor. Her lies are white at first, the shadow 

of a nipple, suggestion of height, a length of pale 

unbroken skin to claim the foreground. Place your hand

there, where she knits a fractured collarbone, ripening stones

to oranges in the nest of a ribcage. She peels the fruit

and stacks it in the tower of my spine. She lets you 

hold the scent and call it a miracle.

---

BETSY MITCHELL MARTINEZ holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Letters, Shenandoah, Washington Square Review, Indiana Review, EPOCH, The Pinch Journal Online, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and Rattle, among other journals.

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