Meghan Sterling

Gap

Again, the shape of the rain, or the space
between rain, by which I mean the gap
we think we see in the middle of things,
in the places they connect or don’t. Again,
my father on the phone when I call, how he speaks
or doesn’t speak and I speak or don’t speak
and both of us are waiting for something, waiting
for the sensation of rain to come and relieve the
nothing we can’t say. My father doesn’t call,
he sits inside when it rains and the rain taps
lightly on the jalousie windows and makes
a sound like smoke, like a train coming to a stop,
the rain of the tropics, a warm rain like the sky
is a dog shaking out its puddle-soaked coat and
again, his dogs sit with him, and he looks to the pack,
counting and calling them, their names the names
of our dead family: Paulie and Jerry and Moishe,
and again, the space when he says them, the slow pause
of his tongue finding its place in his mouth, and again
the space when the dogs hear his call and choose to
respond, or don’t choose if they are getting into the treats
in the pantry or fighting in the kitchen over a ragged rope,
and again the rain and the small space between, as big as a child
or a man, and again the rain holds itself back for a moment
as if deciding whether to allow touch before it relents, gives itself
to the empty green lawns and vacant blue pools.

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Meghan Sterling’s work has been nominated for 4 Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, Radar Poetry, The West Review, West Trestle Review, River Heron Review, SWIMM, Pinch Journal and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her first full length collection These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021. Her chapbook, Self Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will be out in 2023.