San Francisco Skirts
  
In San Francisco circa 1930
where Frida lived before New York and Detroit
there was no shortage of illegal spirits for sale
but Frida spent her precious coins on silks. 
She loved Chinatown, the joyful clamor 
of the shops. Toys, trinkets, silks of infinite 
weights and patterns, hand-sewn birds, flowers, 
tiny figures in peaked hats.
She loved the Chinese style of dress, how the Chinese stayed Chinese
in America, the way she stayed vividly Mexican
wherever she went—precisely, Tehuana--
of the Isthmus from whence her mother came, where women wear and keep the gold
and hold their bosslady heads high.
A few of Frida’s San Francisco skirts survived the comings and goings
between Mexico and the States.
I, the bright yellow one, the colour Frida said the ghosts wear,
was her favorite, but we all could take her back rápido
to the heady days of firsts when she was twenty-three,
not twenty like she’d have you believe.
First year of marriage to Diego.
First trip outside her homeland.
First glimpse of the ocean, first
sea-swell leap into her yet-to-be-landed life. 

**
 
Underskirt of Matilde Calderón de Kahlo 
 
You’ll find no picture of Frida wearing me,
an ankle-length underskirt of organdy cotton and Valencia lace.
Frida wrote to her mamacita nearly every day
but never let me grace the hemline of her radiant rabonas,
not even after her mama passed.
She couldn’t bear to wear me
or to give me away, belonging
as I did to her mother’s firm Catholic body,
Matilde Calderón de Kahlo
whose love was
solid as the table you’ve laid me on so carefully
to assess the damage and the beauty,
the beauty and the damage.
When Frida brought the trunk of Matilde’s things 
to Detroit, she left me behind in Mexico.
How can such a daughter come from such a mother, you ask?
One was all prayer and discipline, the eldest 
child of a Spanish general and a Tehuana.
The other was all pleasure and impertinence.
It’s a mystery as intricate and delicate as my lace:
a daughter’s love for the woman she is distinctly not,
but without whom she doesn’t exist.
 
**

Skirt Trio
 
You see me in the well-known Kodachrome 
image shot by Frida’s lover Nickolas Muray 
on a New York City rooftop, circa 1946. 
A blue so infused with light it doesn’t look real.
The colour, Frida said, of electricity
and purity love.
Of sky and sky and sky.
But I’m really that blue.
That blue exists, and I am it.
Or I was, once,
before Diego locked me up,
part jealousy, part protection,
but not in equal proportion.
 
*
 
Of all Frida’s skirts, we’re the most depicted,
if not the most beloved—military green,
the drab olive Frida called
the color of leaves, sadness, science, the whole of Germany.
You see us in My Dress Hangs Here, finished in 1933, 
and also in Memory, from 1937,
and The Two Fridas, 1939, with slight alterations:
twin bands of red ribbon, an increase of lace.
We’re the hue of desolation, of far from home.
Of pain, dislocation, 
putrescence,
a country drunk on the black milk of hatred, 
dragging the world back to war.
 
*
 
I’m made of printed Manchester cotton 
of the kind adored by Tehuanas and thus in good supply 
in Mexico. An immigrant fabric
with a deep lace-trimmed flounce.
But Frida loved me.
Someone who knew this arranged me on her bed 
after her death, in a semblance of fullness.
Gisele Freund photographed Frida in me in 1953.
She said, don’t look at the camera, 
just lie in your bed like that, 
with your world all around you. The books, fresh flowers, a few 
small paintings, but not the medicines and syringes 
Frida kept in the bathroom, the Leche de Magnesia,
the hand-labeled bottle of chloroformo.
Frida’s fully dressed in her narrow bed, fingers bejeweled, 
staring into space with a ferocious, calm focus.
She isn’t well. Her legs ache. Her spine. 
She is tired. Of injury, the marathon of healing, even loving.
In her last years, she often needed
to lie down like this and stare out the window,
especially after working, as she did that morning
on a portrait of her beloved late father. 
She knew it would be her turn to go soon
but not that she’d lose a leg first.
I kept her secrets for so long and would 
have gone on keeping them. 
A limp, the touch of lovers, 
the blood and wind and briny woman smells,
the half-leg stub after the amputation. 
After that it didn’t matter what Frida wore--
the devastation couldn’t be contained.
She wrote in her diary: I hope the leaving is joyful--
and I hope never to return.

**

United Skirts of the Casa Azul

Incarceration in Frida’s rooms for fifty years
is no way to treat us
who so faithfully served our mistress.
Diego was crazed with grief when he made that decree.
Is it 1965? 1982? 2030? We can’t say,
only that it’s been too long
since we’ve seen the sun and the moths 
never relent. We’re not alone here.
There’s lipstick, perfume, sketches, paintings, 
diaries, medicines, boots, 
corsets, prosthetics,
huipil and rebozo.
But we don’t speak for such things.
We only speak for skirts.
Specifically, Frida’s.
What would our mistress have been without us?
The eyebrows were only part of the overall effect.
We were as precious to Frida as her paints and brushes.
Because skirts have powers.
Not the least of which: freedom of movement.
A skirt can conceal or reveal. A skirt swishes and sways
or hangs straight, can change hearts
and steal minds. Skirts know
things only skirts can know.
We grant that sometimes Frida wore pants. 
But let’s be clear: a skirt isn’t just a woman’s 
garment - imagine how history would be 
different if more men
wore skirts.

Colleen Morton Busch

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, published by Penguin Press and named a best book by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won Ex Ophidia Press’s Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest, judged by Felicia Zamora, and will be published in summer 2026.

By popular demand, we begin 2026 with a new monthly series of generative writing sessions on zoom! 

Welcome to Ekphrasis Anonymous!

Each session will include a curated selection of diverse artworks and prompt ideas for brainstorming and generating poetry or fiction. We will look at and discuss each artwork briefly, then spend time writing. We will have a few minutes to talk about our process and the option for a couple of people to share their drafts after each exercise. The curated artworks will be a grab-bag each time, from different artists, eras, styles, and cultures, chosen to inspire your writing and challenge you to new directions.

​The first session starts this Thursday. Join us!

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cephalopod Mollusk

after Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value, by Enrique Chagoya (USA, b. Mexico) contemporary
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/illegal-aliens-guide-concept-relative-surplus-value-78309
​ 
I am not this gorilla businessman, briefcase/club high in my hand; grey and shaggy-haired, he walks on storm waves. I am not these oil tankers, super ships, or tiny boats for no more than four folks, or these ducks in a row. I am not a robot airborne on a flying fish, my cold metal legs grasping its cold metal scales, listening to the deep bass quote Marx. I am not Olive Oil or Popeye, but I’d like to be. I am not surrounded by a golden gilded frame as interesting as I am. I am this red octopus, a tentacled child of October, my speech a tangled graph.
  
Stephen D. Gibson

Stephen D. Gibson studied writing at Purdue University and the University of Houston. His short fiction has appeared in The Citron Review, 100WordStory, and Wigleaf. It has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best Microfiction. When not reading, writing, or playing board games, he is with his family. They have a no-pet policy.

Graffiti in Rome
 
just remember that certain things will always be true: / half of us are used like mules /
 to carry the other half into oblivion; / […] somewhere the same men in the same uniform /
​come alive next morning / and fight again until cold night falls. 
SC Flynn, “Last Words”, Abridged 0-92 The Violet Hour. 
 
A man, crucified, with a donkey head – or maybe a mule:
Mocking the faith that worships a god dying like a slave.
A private visit to a famous graffiti, against a dark blue dawn,
Only a bakery is open, the bread hot, white like marble.
From the ground floors of the palaces upward, 
Only grates, princes having ruled in fear, with fear.
The Renaissance of clashing mobsters, 
All forgotten or, rather, just the half who toiled,
Beauty – beauty absolves the world;
Give us a masterpiece, and you will resuscitate a virgin,
Come alive and useful, a cosmos that transforms violence,
New but different, like the alleyways misleading the tourists, 
The soldiers, the ideals, the deities, the arcs of triumph, and
The bell towers presiding the ghetto. 
You passed a horse drinking at a fountain, 
The whip nowhere to be seen – yet.
 
Massimiliano Nastri

Massimiliano Nastri: "An ever-receding biography. I spent my childhood in a German-speaking village on the Italian Alps, something redolent of Heidi, the cartoon. Three PhDs: is it an achievement? I only have few and minor publications, two unpublished novels, and some poems I am very proud of on Ink Sweat and Tears, Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, and The Ekphrastic Review – eternally grateful in this life.  I work as a teaching assistant at Queen’s University Belfast, where I am revising a book about the interwar collapse of Centre-right parties and the rise of fascism. Ominous and irrelevant together is a rare feature, indeed. Fifty years old, still swimming – slower and slower."

Moonstone Diner: 54th & 7th, 1:00 A.M.
 
after Waitress, Diner, New York City, photography by Elliot Erwitt (USA) 1955 
https://www.jacksonfineart.com/artists/elliott-erwitt/new-york-city-usa-1955/
​
I’m the star of a play. Like Groundhog Day we repeat.
The house is always packed. Our patrons repeat.
I’m still Off-Off Broadway, I’m paying my dues.
I cross downstage and up.  My cues I repeat.
I do tread the boards but not as I’d expect.
Linoleum diner floors. Disinfect, wash, repeat.
An apron my costume, an order pad, my prop.
What’ll it be? I fill up your cup; repeat.
I loop through the restaurant. I command my stage.
New patrons come in. My script I repeat.
How I long to speak words of Inge and Albee.
Instead I speak greetings and order repeats.
I want to embody Ophelia, her madness insane.
Not live my own madness, go home and repeat.
Why did I move here, perhaps for a dream?
It’s turned to a nightmare, a loop I repeat.
It’s curtain call now, the end of my day.
Linoleum diner floors. Disinfect, wash, repeat.
I linger a moment with my nicotine bouquet;
inhaling her deep, I exhale I repeat.
As I kill the lights I look back at my stage,
Good night you old diner, I’ll see you tomorrow: Exit Sara: REPEAT.

​Sara Castaneda

Sara Castaneda is a poet/writer.  Her poetry collection, Underdog Bet, was published in March, 2025 by Pegasus/Vanguard Press. Her poems have been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Morsus Vitae and Zebra Ink. She has a collaborative speculative short story in Space & Time Magazine. She is the Editor of the Collaborative Lab Space at Authortunities. She is also VP on the board of 11th House Publishing. Sara lives in Dallas, TX with her husband, Scott, and they are proudly owned by their three cats and dog.