frida & the black girls
- frida & the black girls
after the Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 5/16/08
i took the girls to see frida & she/we was magnificent.there was a no culluds sign outside the pizza shop,but we pushed past the gestapo & traipsed like nefertitisto the coal brick oven where frida was sittin like a creamy lotus in the pan.& the girls stuck their fingers in the oven(even though they mamas had told them not to)& they brought frida's cream to their lips,blowin a gold dust into the absinthe eyes of the curatin bartenders.& we taste frida's mayan underworlds in the basil & kalamatas& the girls discovered their own gelatowhile i bought a print with a few small nips of credit:"expensive shit," fela, or "cheap art," mamí?we lifted the backs of our skirts leavin the museum,our bottoms etched with vines. [End Page 37]
Yolanda Wisher (yolandaj@gfsnet.org) received an MA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Temple University. In 1999, she was named the first poet laureate of Montgomery County. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Meridians, Fence, nocturnes, and Chain, as well as the anthologies Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, The Fence Reader, and Lavanderia. A Cave Canem fellow, Wisher teaches English at Germantown Friends School and chairs the Germantown Poetry Festival. She is also the host of "umüvme" (you-move-me), a poetry internet radio show on www.gtownradio.com.
