What the Water Gave Me, by Mary Ann Crowe

What the Water Gave Me, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1938

What the Water Gave Me
                
Patron saint of female artists determined to have a child, thoughts turn to you as I'm thrown off balance, bloodied knees again. A quarter inch shorter since the pandemic with more discomfort in my three scoliotic curves. Yes, that is nothing compared to all your brutal surgeries. Still, thinking of you more often as I return to back braces, one of your paintings comes back to me––with some vague connection to New York and your last miscarriage––and I find it; startling to see that it is not the usual view of yourself in a mirror portrait, but the view of your legs and feet in a bathtub. Your toes angle down and could be mine. I couldn't recall the objects in the bathwater but can see now they are selected scenes from your life, icons depicted as small floating Hieronymus Bosch bathtub toys with a threatening Empire State Building, all placed strategically to obscure any lower leg deformity. Only your parents are fully clothed in this limbo. The ugly braces are gone, but what causes blood to drip from your right big toe? And where is Diego? Perhaps disguised as the skinny white-haired old hermit tightening the rope around your neck. Or, have you painted over him below the water’s surface, cleansing him from this history, to be washed down the drain.  

Mary Ann Crowe 
 
Mary Ann  Crowe moved to Santa Fe (Holy Faith-O'gha Po'oge/White Shell Water Place), New Mexico to recuperate from debilitating illness. Poems appear or are forthcoming in After Hours Journal (2023 Mary Blinn Prize finalist), Flying South, Stories That Need To Be Told 2022, Sin Fronteras, Miriam's Well. "War Child Lament 2020" was a poetry prize winner for the Pasatiempo 2020 Writing Contest, reprinted in Writing In A Woman's Voice, 2/28/23. As a visual artist-activist-writer, her essays, art installations and public art projects have addressed gender, the environment, war, and gun violence. Barnard College graduate born in Munich, Santa Fe is her 30th move between Germany, New York, Chicago, and Puerto Rico.