Frida
by Anne Whitehouse
Anne Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Outside from the Inside, Meteor Shower, The Refrain, and Blessings and Curses. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Frida is Anne’s third chapbook published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press, following Surrealist Muse, about Leonora Carrington, in 2020, and Escaping Lee Miller, in 2021.
from Frida
After the Mexican Revolution,
the family began its slide into poverty,
when Guillermo lost his commission
documenting his adopted country’s
architectural heritage. His beloved
Blue House had to be mortgaged.
Misanthropic, epileptic,
he retreated into failure,
while his shrewd, illiterate wife
managed the finances.
Frida was saucy, impertinent, lively,
despite her withered leg and limp
from polio. She was eighteen years old
and in love with an older student, Alejandro,
when one September afternoon, after school,
the rickety, wooden bus they were riding
was rammed by a street trolley.
They had been on another bus
when she missed her pink parasol,
and they got off to look for it.
After a while they gave up
and caught the next bus.
It was a long bus with benches
on either side. Struck in the middle,
the bus bent until it burst into pieces,
while the train kept moving.
It is a lie that one is aware of the crash,
a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears.
The crash bounced us forward, and a handrail
pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull.
A man saw me having a tremendous hemorrhage.
He carried me and put me on a billiard table
until the Red Cross came for me.
