by Meghan Sterling

Something about the way a mother
can keep herself from falling. Having
children ruins your life, my mother raised
her glass and toasted after my baby shower.
Something about the way the river turns, its
sunken blue like a stone in place of a doll’s eye.
Something about the myth of a mother’s love.
Love is not an automatic thing, my mother said.
What was it that ground us down to dirt? Something
about my head tilting up in the dark, cracking my
mother’s nose with my chin. My lips are lucky
to find her cheek, still smooth, still scented with leaves. Something about the turned back. Nothing drives
love away like loving too much, my mother said

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Meghan Sterling (she/her) is a bi/queer writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain, and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

by Meghan Sterling

I held my baby daughter in her yellow rainsuit every day
on the four-month trip out West: Big Sur, Olympia, Whistler,

Glacier, smile all tooth and grimace in our photographs by the sea,
the yellow nylon like a fever I clutched so I wouldn’t throw her down

to dirt and dart away. Madness’ keen approach like a wolf, lit by stars,
steering my hands to shred at my skin, a crow’s beak tearing apart

a nest in its search for hunger’s end. My daughter’s need a dog’s
steady howl, all night her shrieks of want no voice could answer,

no touch could calm. My breasts shrugged their empty flesh
and I sang a lullaby to still the tremble at the corners—

all the pretty little horses and their bright stampede across my hands,
the walls of the metal camper thin as a knife’s knowing blade.

Every cliff’s lip I considered from a stone’s view—such a long way
down, such a quick step to go from rest to motion, fall to free.

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Meghan Sterling’s debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021. Sterling’s work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023.

by Meghan Sterling

The day began with the familiar madness—the fists to flesh of self-harm.

How embarrassing, this urge to beat at myself, to hammer, to pummel my brain

against a wall, pushed by something small, my daughter’s refusals, my husband’s

withdrawn and walled face. This morning, after a long night, my daughter spitting her

medicine onto my chest sent me out of the room, slamming my hands

onto my head, ramming my fingers into my skin, out of ear-shot but for that

satisfying thunder against my skull—how it quiets the noise, soothing like a ragged purr.

My mother used to pull chunks of her hair out, fistfuls in her red hands. White knuckles.

I too am a container that is over-full. I am a container for their wants and it is spilling

over into the thirsty dirt. My family wants my attention as though I can make flowers bloom

at a glance, the medicine staining my hands pink as a lie, the medicine spattered in fuchsia dots

across the ceiling, out of the reach of my sponge. I remember the hitting, how it seemed to come

like a tiger from behind a tree, but the rage like white spit on freckled lips—I know that now.

It lives with me, a sleeping cat that wakes to feed on occasion, wild with hunger, teeth displayed.

And still, I am broken, a container holding the pent-up tears of my family and bills like a flood

and the ancestral search for a piece of land to plant with sun-starved seeds and my daughter’s

toddler fury and the poems festering like scratches left by dirty claws where all I can do

is tear open a hole in my skin so that the whole vessel doesn’t explode.

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Meghan Sterling lives and teaches workshops in Portland, Maine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Night Heron Barks, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, Westchester Review, Pine Hills Review, and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, winner of Sweet Lit's 2021 annual poetry contest, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident. Her collection These Few Seeds is out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. Read her work at meghansterling.com.