Poetry by Meghan Sterling

               ​Tony Webster CC



One Morning When We Rose Early
 
Memory of her voice, her crown, on the phone in the dark, 
as we planned for a sunrise over the Catskills, and the next day 
 
as I waited for the light to come over the hill, for her to come 
and be the light before the light. This was before I understood 
 
that wanting comes from somewhere hurt. Her breasts like the bed 
I wanted to die in, her voice like the color green, her face 
 
like the harvest moon, dipped in wax. I wanted to touch her body 
the way I had wanted to be touched by my mother: gently, just before sleeping, 
 
sexless as stones. I waited on the hill and she came before dawn 
as she said she would, came under my blanket to warm with me our bodies 
 
as the sky bloomed from navy to white, the last star holding stubborn 
to watered silk. She came and shivered with me and the icy sun 
 
and we sang rounds, me and this mother I had made for myself 
in the Great North out of flesh and cloth.

​

Meghan Sterling’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, The West Review, Colorado Review, Pacifica Literary Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and many others, and was the winner of Sweet Literary’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest, Winner of Equinox’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest, and a Finalist in River Heron Review’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest and Gigantic Sequins’ 2021 Annual Poetry Contest.  She is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review, a Hewnoaks Artist Colony resident in 2019 and 2021, and her debut collection, These Few Seeds, came out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. She and her family live in Portland, Maine. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

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