You Are Here to Break Apart by Meghan Sterling

“What a lush and complex world Meghan Sterling gives us in You Are Here to Break Apart. “–Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems

You Are Here to Break Apart

And all that is ruin of flower, of the drilled well,
the layer of rubble left in the cornfields, now pasture
for neighbor’s cattle, bones of the spent nickel raked
into piles, nuzzled by the Holstein out in the singed grass,
a ring of fire at night for the hunters seeking coyotes’
bodies to pile, pyre. Blood mouthed calls of the coyotes
tearing apart a single cow, the gunshots the next night
in retribution. And time like a bullseye painted on the side
of an oak, its leaves dry in what used to be spring.
All that was bullet, ruin of the road that carried
milk to the markets in Chattanooga, the hunters’ stands
in the trees like magpie’s nests with their treasures—
porn magazines, ammunition, crushed cans of Sundrop
and moonpie wrappers, sun faded camo baseball caps
and a shattered pair of binoculars. And a knife, its point
like the brown of a cow’s eye, lit as a lake at dawn, distant
as a father, as much in the past as beauty ever was,
eye of water, of gathering cloud.

About the Author

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. She lives in Maine with her family, works as a professional writer and teaches poetry workshops. Read her work at meghansterling.com.