Meghan Sterling

Sea That Has Become Known

You think you’ve seen it, the shape of moon
in the surface of your bed, the movement
of your own body in water when all is lost
to buoyancy, when everything else has been
drowned in remembering. What was it really.
Pines like the brushes you used to comb
your toy ponies. Stone and bark collections
staining the white wooden sill. A baby that cries
in the night with a voice like the underside
of an oyster shell—sharp flakes like skin and its
metallic rainbow. All you know is yourself in
different forms—puddles full of palm fronds, rivers
stumbling over boulders, oceans that separated
you from your body—how in dreams it all bends
to the moon you once saw in the palm of hands
full of pond water. How the hands were yours.

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Meghan Sterling’s work has been nominated for 4 Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, Birdcoat Quarterly and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review. Her first full length collection These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021 and was an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), will be out in 2023. Her second full length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, won the Paul Nemser Poetry Prize (Lily Poetry Review) and will be out in 2023. Read her work at meghansterling.com.