Meghan Sterling

WHAT IS ENOUGH

The poem ends with an image. The moon, the birds. Has the poem earned 
the right to these images, I ask on a bright and cold Sunday afternoon, 

after dreams of old friends woke me early? Has the poem earned the words 
to describe love? The moon is horses, its feet are birds. There is an orchard 

where the birds have replaced the apples in the tallest branches, singing like diamonds 
beneath the earth. Has the poem discovered anything, apart from you, still in love 

with everyone you have ever loved, still in love with old dreams? The house is an ocean,
the moon is a songless bird. I wake up each morning and feel a fool. I miss people I knew

before, and they appear on the page, in my dreams. My dreams show me beauty I can almost 
taste, my hair heavy, my arms impossibly long, like the necks of cranes when I straggle awake, 

born from sleep that showed me the faces of lovers I was too afraid to love. The poem
translates dreams into pictures that live outside my body. The moon is a missing tooth,

the birds on the shore peck at glass they think scraps. The poem says my body is a winter
shadow, power lines reaching toward a horizon cold and straight as a knife, 

birds crowded on a pole above the street, where the moon is snow, friends are birds, 
dreams are long cold lines of light, always reaching. 

Meghan Sterling’s work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Rattle, Sky Island Journal, Glass Poetry Journal, Literary Mama, and Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest. She is co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review, was Featured Poet of Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 Issue, A Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident in 2019. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press in 2016. Her first full-length collection, These Few Seeds, is coming out in April 2021 from Terrapin Books. She lives in Portland, Maine with her family.