Desperate Beauty
By Gail Goepfert
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
—I paint flowers so they will not die. Frida Kahlo We are watchers, Frida— aching but obedient to light, resurrected by shocks of color. Mornings you pluck bougainvillea or pearly gardenias, plait them in your hair above your brow. I shadow the fire of spring poppies and the profusion of lilacs and pink hydrangea. With the organ pipe cactus, you spike a sage-green fence on the borders of La Casa Azul tuned to the rhythms of sun and rain—its lavender-white flowers tint while you sleep. Our love-eyes like greedy tongues lick the rare-red of wild angel trumpets. We are aficionados. Pregnant with joy in the garden’s cosmos. We pursue hues like lovers’ lips, stalk columns of yellow calla-lilies, praise the allure of honey-petalled sunflowers and the lobes of violet irises. We thrive on iridescence— our eyes attuned to its blessing. Watchers. We bend near in reverence to the bloom— all pain humbled, stilled for a time by beauty.
Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, authored books that include A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018), Get Up Said the World (Červená Barva Press, 2020), and Self-Portrait with Thorns (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). This Hard Business of Living, a collaborative chapbook with Patrice Boyer Claeys, was released in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press, and two photoverse books, Honey from the Sun, 2020, and Earth Cafeteria, 2023, celebrate fruits and vegetables with Claeys’s centos and Goepfert’s photography. Recent work appears in Ran Away with the Star Bassoon and Tiny Moments. She has been a lifelong educator of junior high through college; her quest is to seek beauty.
03/13 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Hua Xi and local poets Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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Sensual verse in true communion with Kahlo. 🌺