Meghan Sterling

Before school there are icicles

clattering on the frosted snow, a dozen of them that gave way
and fell together, music like tin chords on strings of wind,
microscopic piano notes ringing across the tunnel between
buildings, and we are delighted. Echo of winter morning,
sharper for all the lonely air, no birds to fill the sky, no clouds,
only the vibrant blue like our heads thrown back, branches encased
in ice completely as though struck by a spell, and we sing: the sky
is a million mirrors, the sky wears the tips of the branches like the diamond frills
of the Elizabethans, and we crown it queen. Shadow of sun across the glass
driveway, and I try to nudge my daughter toward the car, playing freeze tag,
desperate not to slip. She asks for icicles to suck so we leap from tree to tree
as I break off the dangling bits, cold threatening to cut exposed skin,
flesh of my hands raw, each tender icicle like a finger prick of good for her to taste—
something of the tree in it, something of the sky.

Judge’s Comments —
This poem transforms an icy morning and its “lonely air” into a moment of awe and connection. “[And] we are delighted” ends the first winding sentence that begins with the poem’s title. What delighted me was the simultaneous sureness and elasticity of lines that make way for juxtaposition and swerve, enacting the experience of wonder on the page. We leap from a glassy driveway to Elizabethan collars, from a morning’s routine to the emerging archetypal. Only this time the “spell” is not a curse but “a finger prick of good for her to taste.” I was utterly convinced by the singing in this poem.

— Laura Donnelly

Meghan Sterling lives and teaches poetry workshops in Portland, Maine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, The Night Heron Barks, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, Sky Island Journal, Westchester Review, Pine Hills Review, Mom Egg Review and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books.