Mirande Bissell
Mirande Bissell is a poet and teacher who lives in the Patapsco River Valley, west of Baltimore. Her first collection of poems, Stalin at the Opera, was selected by Diane Seuss as the 2020 winner of the Ghost Peach Press Prize and came out in 2021. In 2024, several of her poems were honored in poetry contests, including "Tilt," which was selected by Jake Skeets to win the Yellowwood Poetry Prize for Yalobusha Review.
Heliotropism
Past the Woodstock bridge, black rocks
at dusk and the snowy slope where you nest,
a fat, orange bird in the branches,
untroubled by dying.
Stay with me, Sun,
in the pines of the valley where mornings
with coyotes and minnows,
I turn to you
unbowed by the interdiction
against addressing the light.
Let’s talk for ages.
No darkness will pass between us in this world,
though the world will be dark, and you
with all your furnaces can’t spare the whales
the dirty tricks, the banging sea, us.
Wrath burned up in you long ago.
Your voice is girlish even now,
and you hear our petitions without killing.
Whatever they say of you,
you left Job’s children untouched.
You hush as I tell you
of the undiscovered country
where all that you greened and bleached,
all of us you loved, iris and knuckle,
will reassemble one day, imperfected,
in bodies relieved of godliness.
Cold days, a woman will rise in the blue,
the motherheart fusing in her core,
warming you—you, Sun, in the leaves, like
a deer mouse, small enough finally to sleep.
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