How to Survive a Maine Winter
by Meghan Sterling
How many times have I gone down to water to drown?
Where I would go to weep, to think, in my last-ditch effort
to save myself, how I would go to the river or ocean or stream
and witness the way the world shifted in the mirror of the surface
of moving water, and decide to keep living. I would go to the water
and imagine myself below, logs breaking down into brown muck,
trout or stingrays and their gleaming mottled skin like the stars I follow
into my dreams, muskies and bass and the yellow salamanders darting
along a bank steep sloped with sweetgum and poplar or anole lizards
in the Florida panic grass, the river birches or palm trees dragging
their branches like the weeping of a million mothers. My mind returns there
when I’m in trouble, flips it all upside down, moves its parts around
into a diagram of survival—first the shore is sky, then the trees are sky,
then the water is sky, and everything that swims now flies.
Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Rattle, and many others, and has been nominated for multiple 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, all came out in 2023. Her next collections, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press) and Sick Poems from the Lovebed (Harbor Editions) are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026. She lives in Maine.
Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash