What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published five poetry collections. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001) and The Huntress (Seren, 2005), were shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and were both Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005, and was a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. She teaches poetry courses in the galleries at Tate Modern, and tutors for the Arvon Foundation, Taliesin Trust and The Poetry School. What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo's work, while others are parallels or versions where Petit draws upon her own experience as a visual artist to create alternative "paintings" with words. The Bus I have not yet caught the bus, but we are all here ready to play our parts: the housewife with her basket, the barefoot mother nursing her child, the boy gazing out the window just as later he'll stare through the smeared pane and catch the tram's advance, his eyes wide as globes. The gringo holds his bag of gold dust. I am next to him, sixteen, my body still intact when the bag explodes and something bright as the sun fills the air with humming motes that stick to my splattered skin. Then the labourer with his mallet will heave the silver post out of me. His blue overalls are clean. He is not surprised to find me alive. Here, in Coyoacán at the stop, where the six of us wait on a bench side by side, just as we will sit in the wooden bus, comrades in the morning of my life. The Wounded Deer I have a woman's face but I'm a little stag, because I had the balls to come this far into the forest, to where the trees are broken. The nine points of my antlers have battled with the nine arrows in my hide. I can hear the bone-saw in the ocean on the horizon. I emerged from the waters of the Hospital for Special Surgery. It had deep blue under-rooms. And once, when I opened my eyes too quickly after the graft, I could see right through all the glass ceilings, up to where lightning forked across the New York sky like the antlers of sky-deer, rain arrowing the herd. Small and dainty as I am I escaped into this canvas, where I look back at you in your steel corset, painting the last splash on my hoof. What the Water Gave Me (VI) This is how it is at the end – me lying in my bath while the waters break, my skin glistening with amnion, streaks of starlight. And the waters keep on breaking as I reverse out of my body. My life dances on the silver surface where cacti flower. The ceiling opens and I float up on fire. Rain pierces me like thorns. I have a steam veil. I sit bolt upright as the sun's rays embrace me. Water, you are a lace wedding-gown I slip over my head, giving birth to my death. I wear you tightly as I burn – don't make me come back.