“Surreal”

After Frida Kahlo’s 1944 painting “The Broken Column”

A spine
Broken column
Like Frida’s, only mine
It isn’t beautiful, just mine
My spine

The pain
It is so real
The painting seems surreal
Her pain and mine bound together
Our pain

Sickness
My back succumbs
Hers injured all at once
While mine crumbles from the decay
In time

Fissure
Through her torso
Mirrors fissure through mine
Cracked open for the world to see
Our bones

Suffer
With craggy spines
Our bodies weep as one
Our reality seems unreal
Surreal

---

“Villain”

In a fairy tale I would be the villain
Body horror as a punishment

My body a horror of punishment
Cast into a grim ending by my own deeds

Cast into a Grimm ending by the hero
My fate is written as bloody and gruesome

My feet are riven, bloody and gruesome
I start the story disabled and evil

I end the story evil made disabled
A penal system that hates the disabled

A penal system that makes the disabled
This story promises to break me

This story promises to transform me
In a fairy tale I would be the villain

---

Elizabeth Kolar (she/they) is a queer, disabled poet, fiction writer, and blogger from Canada. She runs The Feminist Bibliothecary blog.

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