after Ana Mendieta
i.
I’ll return in blood-paint.
Santa Muerte, goddess of death,
my body imprinted
on a sheet
in a fissured portal,
Candlewood branches
arcing at my feet.
ii.
My art, my sex
enraged him.
He shoved me
through the window glass;
I spilled across Manhattan.
iii.
Beside the ocean
my open hands, vermilion
mark the sand ridge.
The tide comes,
washes the rest of my body
clean.
Photo “Broken Mirror” by Max Goldberg ; licensed under CC BY 2.0
Poet, memoirist, and essayist Carol Dine’s books include Orange Night (2014), poems inspired and accompanied by the images of Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak, Van Gogh in Poems, and a memoir, Places in the Bone. Her work has appeared in Boulevard, Bitter Oleander, Lilith and Salamander, among other journals. Carol has been a poet-in-resident at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Arts. She teaches poetry at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Boston.
Latest posts by Carol Dine (see all)
- Siluetas/Silhouettes - March 5, 2017