Julie E. Bloemeke | Three Self-Portraits in Succulent

Julie E. Bloemeke (she/her) is the author of Slide to Unlock (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) and co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). A two-time recipient of Books All Georgians Should Read, she is also the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist. Winner of the 2022 Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have been featured on NPR, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Writer's Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, and others. An associate editor for South Carolina Review and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, she is also a contract-based writer, editor, teacher, and consultant. In 2023, a broadside of her poem, "Glass City," was commissioned by the Hiltons at Toledo Downtown to be on permanent view as part of the hotel's commitment to arts and industry collaboration. An advocate for Downtown Toledo revitalization efforts, she also directs the annual #5poets5parks initiative with Metroparks Toledo. Today, March 12, is the fifth anniversary of Slide to Unlock's publication date.

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Also by Julie E. Bloemeke: Slide to Unlock Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908

March 12, 2025

Julie E. Bloemeke

Three Self-Portraits in Succulent

— after the exhibition “Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera,” Heard Museum, 2017 I I want the break, split fruit, your beckon of black seed, teeming row after row. You paint kiwis and avocados, uterine and sealed. Today I am not whole, but worse: lust walking through your exhibition, distracted by my neck, stained with indents of his teeth. Gentle still, but lingering. Diego stares down from your forehead. You hold a cigarette, white and burning, a gesture that leaves your fingers longing, returning me to my lover’s hands fully furious in desire. II Tonight he will taste me back and I will think only of what I missed in you: papaya, persimmon, pitaya and water melons, rambutans — a sapote? — mango and orange, cantaloupe and prickly pear all the chosen fruits you painted unopened. Your message to me unread, my body too distracted by the obvious juice of their sliced still life companions. III Forgive me for missing even deeper: your face, how you all but disappear from canvas during this period, how even the sharpest knife delays the halving, as if to say, I leave you with this rendered meal you can never eat, starved for seed, pit hungry, ever halted, ever vanished, bruised in your split from skin.

Note: between 1951 and 1954 Kahlo’s own image virtually disappears from her canvases. I first learned about Frida Kahlo as a teenager; at the time there was only a single book about her at my local library. Over the years, I've sought out exhibitions of her work in various cities, but this viewing in Phoenix, 2017 struck me especially — it offered an invitation into the contradictions of what desire invites us to see, how it consumes us, and what it obscures us from. I gravitated toward the conversations between fruit — succulents — in various paintings, and this particular juxtaposition of work was anything but still. I could not help but be drawn in by how the sapotes and melons, pitayas and kiwi, were violent, lush, sealed, fertile, carnal, displayed, cautious. In this, they also seemed to reveal a certain presentiment of human absence, roaring in through a lens that could then only be via lust, touch, teeming, devouring, and yet, with an admission of our limits and loss too. I am so grateful this poem found me.