Morning Moon

and a room through a door. The wide wood
of the floor beneath a woman’s feet. How often
I have been that woman, near enough to know
the soot in my mouth was what I called love. How
often the me that I was had drifted into spring sky
sodden as silk, limp as the cherry blossoms left to heap
on the sidewalk. Who is that woman now, the one with
toenails painted scarlet as an act against all the gray
of the place she has made her home, where all that is bright
is what she feels, looking into her daughter’s light, listening
into her lover’s laugh. There are shadows where there was
once color, moons where there were once suns, but the moon
has a curl to its hair like she does, and its white nails tap
at the window and shine a softer light across her hands.

Meghan Sterling’s work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. 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.