Deborah A. Miranda| Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage. Poems by Deborah A. Miranda. Number 12 in Volume Five of our Editor’s Series.

Publication:  January 6, 2024 [100 copies]
19 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-09-9
$ 12.00

[ cover: River, by the author ]

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California and Santa Ynez Chumash lineage. Her mixed-genre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday 2013), received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the  Independent Publishers Association, & was short-listed for the      William Saroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things). Deborah lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife Margo and a variety of rescue dogs. She is Professor Emerita of English at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing.

Persistence

August gives us her last, best fruits. Painted turtle sunning on a log,
back legs lifted toward the sun, feet spread wide like little solar panels,
belly plates splashed in red. Heron gliding up-river on caped wings.
And—frantic splashes in the shallows: water snake wraps a wide
mouth around small tree frog’s head. Patient jaws unhinge; snake
wants to swallow this tender body. But muffled peeps come from 
inside snake: frog’s survival song is strong. Green arms and legs use
snake’s head as leverage; brace and pull. Elegant even in struggle, 
snake’s tail thrashes the water, balancing and rebalancing. These  
creatures look like a fearful hybrid hunger fighting itself: writhing
serpentine body sprouting four wild limbs at one end. A fierce kick!  
of frog’s back legs throws them both onto the rocky shore; small
stones clack as vertebrae, muscles, adrenaline surge—until, like that,
those who were almost one are once again two. Stunned by the     
daylight of second chances, frog blinks golden eyes. Shiny sides and
throat pulse, pulse, pulse . . . then, a clean leap for deep water. Snake
slips back into the river too, undulates across the smooth surface,
scenting for luck. Oh, how can we not love this ferocious life, this
ruthless appetite that bids us endure?

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