Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Mariah Sells

Mariah lives in Virginia, where she teaches honors English and creative writing in high school. Mariah says she was “born a poem” and has been writing in some way ever since age 7. Her favorite poets: Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski.

“An Ekphrastic Visit, Enlightening” pays homage to Frida Kahlo in a contemplation of Kahlo’s self-portrait. The poet might have experienced the portrait as an image of the act of artistic creation in writing as well as in painting:

I became your pain for a brief instant — mind entangled
with brush strokes and brain cells merging with oil-painted
thoughts sliding down each stroke like black-plagued bodies
in pits — families committing suicide and plunging into the pit.

And the painting itself is framed culturally by its context in the museum, hanging as it does between reminders of a lesser past and present.

Mariah Sells’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Mariah. We are looking forward to your other poems on the schedule!