Postpartum

I used to hate the night, the way it separated me from light,
the way it cut off contact, the sun like a friend you watch
guillotined every day. I wept as I saw sunset—I knew 
what was coming. The quiet streets. The occasional car’s 
tires squealing like a pig’s cut throat. The sad blue light 
of a lonely TV buzzing someone into numbness down the block. 
Everyone trying to shake off the day and rinse clean, but night felt dirty to me: 
water left in a tub, smoke lingering in sheets, the way unwanted touch 
remains as though branded into skin. Night was three and a half years 
when the world closed its eyes as I lost my grip on what rest 
even was, when I began to understand the movements of shadows 
in hieroglyphs on the walls as they spoke in groans I could hear
with my hands—my unsleeping daughter crying all night 
into my eyes, my inconsolable daughter screaming all night 
into my mouth.

MEGHAN STERLING

Meghan Sterling’s work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, West Trestle, Radar Poetry, SWWIM, Rust & Moth, and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books. Read her work at meghansterling.com.