Four After Frida Kahlo's Dresses, by Colleen Morton Busch

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.