Frida

This is for the woman with one black wing perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant, who painted herself a present— wildflowers entwining the plaster corset her spine resides in the romance of mirrors. Each night she lay down in pain and rose to her celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead, Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead. And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting like children along the graveled walks of the garden, Diego’s love a skull in the circular window of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow. —rita dove, a sonnet in primary colors.