Grief Assumes The Color Blue, and The Sun Is Now a Stranger

When my mother says
she is a person without a world,
I know we are both running
from when the present is no longer.

Forty suns before today,
I became her visitor;
Forty nights a witness
to where she lays under sterile light.

Because she cannot hold me
she tells me to soften,
but I have already sublimated into mist

—Softly I feel
the world’s embrace
taking shape
in her half-hollowed place.

Valerie Tirado is a Cuban-American writer from Miami, Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Didactics, a medical humanities publication, and is forthcoming in Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices Anthology. A recent graduate of Dartmouth College, she now works in clinical cancer research.