Invisible Line & Want
By Meghan Sterling
Invisible Line
My body is broken as the end of the road
leading into Pierre Lachaise with its jagged
iron gates, the thin rope once stretched
across the entrance now dragged on the ground
by some car overeager to visit after the first snow
fall and no rope would stop them. I had thought
I swallowed that rope when I was small, its twisted
nylon dipped in wax to close the ends of the length,
how it must have split my guts in thirds where now
a metal wire branches and thorns along the length
of my belly. A healer says this is infant hunger trauma.
I say it is a constant hunger for all I could not have—
mother with her sour skin, mother with her gentle
words, singing, singing mother, all that curdled flesh.
Want
I have been almost 19th century in my secrecy about it,
my vague sense of unease. Even now. From the slick
of the bath, there’s the middle-aged bulge of my belly,
the scratch of the Epsom salts under my thighs, the wet
of another woman’s wrists in my memory, the sharp points
of her nipples behind the veil of her knife-thin shirt.
Like knitting needles. Like small gods. The wrought-iron
scent of her sweat in my teeth, the wanting that groveled
in dreams but lay on the floor most days, damp as a towel.
There were never words for what I wanted, not even when
we lay close and compared thumbs. Not even when her breath
was in my mouth, when her hair was in my eyes, when we used
Kool-Aid to dye our hair and bled a watery red. If she grew
too close, I would shake, afraid. It all rests now with all the
ghosts of the undone and unsaid, layered with dust, seeding
its longing in bathwater, rainbow stickers, something lost.
Multi-Pushcart Nominee, Meghan Sterling (she, her, hers) has been published or has work forthcoming in Meridian, Hunger Mountain, The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Rattle, Colorado Review and many other journals. She has been a Hewnoaks Fellow and a Dibner Fellow. 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), her second full length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won the Paul Nemser Poetry Prize (Lily Poetry Review) and her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) all came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here To Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review) will be out in 2025. She lives in Maine with her family, works as a professional writer and teaches poetry workshops. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
