After Watching Footage of the War
by Meghan Sterling
The car was suddenly upside down and backwards,
all wheels and undercarriage rust and a young man
in tears on the sidewalk. Walking home from the crash
in the rain, I fall at a certain slant and wonder if I am fated
to walk with my father’s limp. My people the sun colliding.
My people the collision. We watch the news and our cells remember,
the cells of our ancestors and the escape from a country that didn’t
want us. All the earth left was scrap metal and broken teeth,
a century of apocalypse like a can of beans opened with a knife,
a drizzle that won’t let up, all the people in Florida watching the news
from their chairs. Here I learned our bodies were in argument. Here
that our bodies long for anything resembling safety. That I will cry mama
when I am dying. That you will too. My people won’t let themselves
into their bodies, their legs are shut doors, their mouths are windows
smeared with paraffin. They have worn their body like armor, breastplates
nearly caved in with blows. I have worn this body long enough to know
that what is underneath soon appears on the surface, rises like bones,
like rust, like fat to skim off the broth. I have worn this body long enough
to know that there are many ways to die and all of them brutal.
“I think war is a trauma that lives in our bones, gets passed down to the next generation as a kind of constant vigilance. I saw the way my grandparents were shaped by war and that has shaped me. The war in Ukraine, which is the land my ancestors fled, has brought it back—the stories, the landscape, the fear. Writing it down lets me look at it again, unearth the bones, examine them, keep myself awake.” —Meghan Sterling
Meghan Sterling (she, her, hers) lives in Maine. Her work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Poetry South, and many others. These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books, 2021) was an Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Finalist. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) are all forthcoming in 2023.