Sighting

by Meghan Sterling

​Delicate birdsong 
and yesterday’s rain
disappearing into grass 
and pavement, down 
sewer grates and gutters, 
the greedy river wild and 
stuttered with wind like 
a fork’s metal tines. I don’t 
know who I will be today— 
the bird on the wire or the bird 
in flight. Silver tarnished or polished. 
How can I be enough
do enough, feel enough.
O river bird. O drowned hours.

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Meghan Sterling is a writer and working mother. She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Crab Creek Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry and many others. Her 7th collection, Sick Letters from the Lovebed (Harbor Editions) is forthcoming in 2026. Poet Laureate of Gardiner, Maine, read her work at meghansterling.com.