Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome Seattle poet Mary Ellen Talley with “Frida Quicksteps Across the Museum Floor,” a delightfully evocative soliloquy from the spirit of Frida Kahlo. She haunts the Portland Art Museum alongside her art and curated personal photos, free from pain but missing the other sensations of corporality. “If I could I would quickstep/ across wet pigment.// Go ahead listen as color congeals./ I would let it hop-step/ across the ceiling of my cortex./ I would take back my right foot/ and sway across these galleries/ to mariachi music./ I would play my accordion for you.” The visual form of the poem, full of internal spaces and sliding sections of indented lines, dances on the page, abetted by alliterative and assonant music. If Frida cannot dance in her body, she does so through the bright colors and the figures, at once earthy and fantastic, which pay homage to her “sliced watermelon of a cut open life.” The pain is still barely contained by the art, but there is a sense of release here, of abandon and transcendence.
Read “Frida Quicksteps Across the Museum Floor” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Mary Ellen Talley has been haunting Seattle, Washington as a special educator since college years and now as a poet and grandmother. Besides having numerous poems in journals and anthologies, she has had three chapbooks published, Postcards from the Lilac City from Finishing Line Press in 2020, Taking Leave from Kelsay Books in 2024, and Infusion online from Red Wolf in 2024. She loves to haunt art museums; in fact, her poem published in “Haunting” was inspired by a visit to the Portland (OR) Art Museum.