You want a sordid confession?

This isn’t one.

It isn’t even a game of getting even,

not with the schoolgirls in that hostile brigade

who served me to the devil in chants

who spat me out

for being half-Jewish

for having a foreign name

for a father who spoke Spanish like a grunting pig

for being a troublemaker at school

for having a chicken-bone leg

for having a mouth like a sewer

for wanting to be the centre of everything.

In Coyoacan I breathed on a windowpane

turning the glass to steam

and flew out in mist

absorbing all within my being.

Beginning

I began my story at four

with the "tragic ten days"

Zapata’s peasants battling the Carrancistas.

In the garden of the Blue House in Coyoacan,

my museum and mausoleum

with mountains in the background and nopal

which grows perennially on our flag.

My grandparents float above the sea

on the far side of the ocean,

Guillermo Kahlo’s pictures hung on the family tree

inventories of blood and pre-Colombian

monuments, photographs

of Mexico’s patrimony.

These were my nourishment

and my wet-nurse’s milk,

her breasts washed before I suckled.

My Teotichuacan Madonna

and I her mestizo child

she could not take home,

learning about injustice with me

in her brown arms,

the sun’s assault everywhere.

Father was a sick man

vertigo coming monthly

like a woman’s blood.

My right leg thin

as a chicken bone

I could not lose track of illness.

Sex was another affliction:

when puberty spread

from my eyelashes to my toes

in my peaked cap of the cachuchas

I waited for blown roses

in the hot pink air,

and Alejandro, sly as a bomb

to bring me beauty,

the kingdom of a grown life.

September 1925 and my drops of youth

drowned in the collision of a bus and tram

the street erupting

in a thousand notes of chaos.

Feminism in the Hades of my accident,

I lost perspective,

needing a mirror

to see my face, paint

its impassive cruelty,

make pictures tell me

who I was.

I looked past solitude

to the edge

where things became real.

Surfaces are deeper than they seem.

I paint what they show in creases and folds,

tilted heads and curved backs,

still fruit in bowls, leaves and vines,

animals exposed outside cages.

There’s something moving underneath;

hold my pictures to your ear.

Madness

My body is mad.

It listens to my bones exploding.

This is a close-up of my shattered column.

My face is mad.

My third eye is on fire.

They drive pins into my bones.

The hospital is mad.

They sew me together, bit by bit.

The floor drowns in blood.

My mind is mad.

Trapped in the hell of my body.

I paint myself falling from many heavens.

Mexico is mad.

Scarecrow dogs stagger to sugar skulls.

I paint my body as a cadaver.

My husband is mad.

I find him crying at my corpse.

And laugh and laugh, blessed by his pain.