After a photograph by Alejandro Alvarez
	and Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital, 1932

She stands behind the sky-blue armchair
in back of the brick building
where she and Diego now squat.

Brush clenched between her chipped teeth,
she has painted white palm trees
and their beach on the chair

that someone else had spray painted
before.  She is poisoning herself with
oil paint, turpentine, and tap water.

He kills himself with fast food: 
taquitos, beer, and pizza from 7-11,
with too much work.  She will

lose their child in Detroit again.
Around her, blue and teal graffiti
floats against the Pepto pink wall.

She remembers her cracked skeleton, 
the dying fetus she had tied
to her naked body with ropes

of blood at Henry Ford Hospital.
Bleeding beneath a wrapping paper sky,
she froze, without Diego, without words.

This time her hearts and letters 
float free.  They are leaving her
like her child, like her blood.

Wearing black rayon, her eyebrows plucked, 
she holds the pain and longing 
she always brings to this city,

this clipped language, this country 
that froze her out years ago,
that is still poisoning her now.

		After Hung-Ju Kan, Density Vs. Emptiness 19-2 (triptych), 2020

The young artist spent his first days
in the city walking through fog.
Smelling faintly of chlorine,
it erased his way home from 
school, from the bus stop, 
from the corner store that sold
food with no taste, from school. 

He climbed up a street, not his own,
and imagined he had seen someone,
a classmate, emerge from the mist.
Smelling of mocha and turpentine,
she stepped off the slicker-colored bus 
as red smoke swirled around them,
then turned to leaves he could touch
and tear off.

Each night in his apartment, 
windows shut tight against vapor,
against erasure, he dreamed 
of gilt gift wrap from home
covering parked cars and broken couches,
turning them into mountains,
places seen from a distance.

White coat thrown over a jade polyester dress,
the singer graduates from nursing school.

She stands with a friend,
a woman from the Gambia,
the classmate she sang hymns with
at a blind man’s bedside.

The singer’s smile is fixed, 
the way it was when we worked together,
when we sat at desks, answered phones, 
pounded out memos on the last typewriters,

when we blow-dried our pixie cuts, ironed our blouses,
dabbed clear polish on the runs in our stockings.

I wonder if she knew what she was getting into, 
working at the center of this pandemic
in the Bronx where suiting up means

reusing masks and gowns, wearing 
plastic shields and garbage bags,
laundering latex gloves.

		Elsewhere in the city
doctors in private practice die
from the virus; workers who hand out
the masks, who hand out the trays
die from the virus.

Maybe this is the wonder.

The singer gets up before dawn
and comes home in the dark,  
climbing four flights of stairs
as if she were still Sister Blanche

the nobleman’s daughter
who ascends to the scaffold,
bare-headed, wearing white
in the last scene of
Dialogues of the Carmelites.

This time, the singer finds her way
to her upright piano, 
to sing again.