Diane KendigMARIE BLANCHARD, 1914 Listen to Audio Version (9 MB-will take a little time to load)Years later, she laughed about the steakthat came between her and Rivera in the studio they shared in Paris, how it weighed raw on the plate, uncovered for days, a naturaleza muerta that grew more muerta each day. She'd put up with his visions of man-eating spiders, his stare, too, at bedposts and lamps; he'd thrown his shoe at the light bulbs, broken the bathroom mirror each day. Each day, she'd replace the mirror, talk him through. So the steak left to rot did not symbolize their friendship. For his part, it was not a macho matter of cooking exactly. He had rustled up feasts for many, filled the table with Mexican dishes once for Angelina, Apollinaire, and Modigliani. But Diego would not fry a steak for one woman. Two weeks passed. The meat, looking slimy, then green, looked worse. And Marie wouldn't ditch the mess, become just one of the rest of his women, cooking, cleaning, washing, and cooking more-- though most of his other women were painters. Why, Angelina's work shrank to miniatures while she fed his appetites, the way Frida, two wives later in '32 would drop her brush to walk to his scaffold carrying a lunch basket covered with napkins hand-embroidered, "I adore you." Not Marie. Not her. She ignored the stench. *The poem, which first appeared in Slant magazine, is in the anthology, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv.
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