Our Lady of Perpetual Loss

By Deborah A. Miranda

Maybe all losses before this one are practice:

maybe all grief that comes after her death seems tame.

I wish I knew how to make dying simple,

wish our mother’s last week were not constructed

of clear plastic tubing, IVs, oxygen hiss,

cough medicine, morphine patches, radiation tattoos,

the useless burn on her chest.

I’m still the incurable optimist, she whispers,

you’re still the eternal pessimist.

My sister sleeps on a sofa; our brother, exhausted,

rolls up in a blanket on the hard floor.

Curled in a rented white bed, our mother’s body

races to catch up with her driven, nomadic soul.

Those nights alone, foster care, empty beer bottles

taught us she was always already vanishing.

Source: The Zen of La Llorona (Salt Publishing, 2005)

Biography

An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of French ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earning a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Indian Cartography: Poems . . .

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