Deborah A Miranda

Deborah A Miranda Poems

Deborah A Miranda 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 (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher's Association and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. Miranda’s poetry is informed by her mixed-blood ancestry and knowledge of the natural world. Often focused around gender, her poetry treats topics such as mothering and the ability to nurture in a violent world. The Zen of Llorona references the legend of La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, an Indian woman who bears children to a Spaniard; when betrayed, she kills the children and then lives a life of mourning. Miranda’s work has appeared in the anthologies Through the Eye of the Deer (1999), This bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002), The Dirt Is Red Here: Art & Poetry from Contemporary Native California (2002), and Women: Images and Realities—A Multicultural Anthology (2006). She teaches English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.)

The Best Poem Of Deborah A Miranda

Love Poem to a Butch Woman

This is how it is with me:
so strong, I want to draw the egg
from your womb and nourish it in my own.
I want to mother your child made only
of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed
from any man. I want to re-fashion
the matrix of creation, make a human being
from the human love that passes between
our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is:
when you emerge from the bedroom
in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back
over forearms, scented with cologne
from an amber bottle—I want to open
my heart, the brightest aching slit
of my soul, receive your pearl.
I watch your hands, wait for the sign
that means you'll touch me,
open me, fill me; wait for that moment
when your desire leaps inside me.

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