We’re all just walking each other home.
                                —Ram Dass

the days you wake up 
already tired, ready for bed.
make eggs, check, eat them, check, 
what do you mean there’s more?
I water the succulents, text D. about it.
solve the tired problem by going back to bed. 
not to sleep, but to be—
if I relax, something bad will happen 
been wired and tired for months 
(PTSD.)
still, trying. bed, here’s me.

when will I leave my thick mustache alone? 
were you always proud of your eyebrows? 
your modified easel in front, pillow behind, 
a woman at your bedside
who lifts, on a utensil,
a bite of food to your mouth—
is she your mother?
how does it taste?

I gather around me 
(bed pushed up against 
a solid, soundless wall) 
what’s needed:
notebook,
altar on a sage green tray, 
the good weed,
water.

amethyst reminds me 
mysteries happen.
feather, softest thing I let touch my skin. 
photo of me as a child,
gazing worried out a window 
toward blurry pine trees,
queer tarot cards, hundred dollar bill.
convalesce:
to altogether (con) grow strong (valesce). 
(Latin.) today I learned
you had a mirror mounted 
above your bed
so you could paint 
self portraits there.

//

Author’s Commentary:

I wrote “you, me, and Frida” while inhabiting the “second arrow” of a traumatic situation. The initial wound of institutional betrayal had doubled back into a steady, thrumming exhaustion. In that state, the traditional “studio” felt like an impossibility. You are at a desk overtaken by paperwork, you’re up against a wall. You are in a bed that has become a fortress, a raft, an archive, a softness, protecting the dreamer.  

Looking at Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits from this vantage point changed the way I understood ekphrasis. It stopped being an intellectual encounter with Art and became an ergonomic and technical consultation with a predecessor. I was looking at her modified easel. I was looking at the mirror mounted above her bed. I was looking at how she turned the “rectangle” of her confinement into a portal.

In the manuscript-in-progress to which this poem belongs, My Earthly Dispossession, the “rectangle” is a recurring motif. The basketball court, the sketchbook page, the document, the window. These are the confines provided, but they are also some of the materials we have at hand to build a way through. To look at Frida while lying in my own bed, pushed against a soundless wall, surrounded by the “altar on a sage green tray” was to practice a queer ekphrasis of necessity.

This poem is a record of that convalescence. It is about the “secret signature” we make when we refuse to be erased. Right now, in my own studio practice and in a “daybook from exile” that I am curating, I am thinking about this “syntax of survival.” How do we stay close to the ground and attentive to detail when our language has been stripped of its usual protections?

To convalesce—from the Latin convalescere, “to altogether grow strong”—con, “with, together, jointly,” is the primary work of the exile. Frida showed me that the bed is not really where the work stops. It is where the “true words” begin to unfurl.