Losing Miranda by Paula M. Bolado
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't! -The Tempest, Shakespeare
It is Tuesday.
The evening steadily took the light,
dragging its hours to her bed.
Her mind sluggish, and her face—
She once was beautiful but now left with sunken eyes,
deep like a hollow lost ship
where the dripping of leaking water
fills over the heads of the few souls
who have been sacrificed by wild waters.
Those who sought the soft rays—
rays breaching the cold pitch of her eyes—
only became lost again.
In fetus pose, she nurses the bellowing moan
deep inside her womb,
while her boy is sleeping in the next room making
child-like grunts and noises children do,
where he has to sleep with his lamp shining
against the horrors of his youth.
To her it is luminescent, shining, and painful
along her own bedside where she sleeps,
always on the right side.
Tenderly, she reaches to the frozen side of the bed
where nothing lies but cotton folds like razor blades.
The night gathers an orchestra of crickets and frogs
all shouting obscenities at her.
She lies back into the chronic ache and black pool of
memory,
letting the malicious water slam against her vessel.
The Black Raven beats against the hull before he swoops
down upon her chest
picking, scratching, tearing—
the remains of the day.
Away went the prayers to her Father,
the noise drones, and she slowly drifts,
steadily toward a shape in the dark,
molded by gray matter,
making sense as she draws near
seeing something, feeling something
like a touch, or a stroke, felt between two lovers
entangled
under a woven congregation of lustrous stars, vows, and a
baby’s cry.
Awakened by the sound, the electricity is out!
Her son is alone in his room.
Miranda wonders where the angels went.
Sinking into the night, being brave in her vessel,
Wednesday approaches.
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