Out of the Shade

By Meghan Sterling

Issue 52 • Fall 2025 • Poetry

O, my sun—you are already slanting your eyebrows

at me, furrowing in preparation for what’s coming.

Winter is a stone fox. Winter is a cruel master.

My sun will get weak as hair. I have seen babies

stronger. It will no longer hold up the sky with its

long feet or its bold yellow arms. I will be left to

pleasure myself in darkness, beneath a quilt, heavy

with the scent of my own salt. Just the other day

when feeling the light lowering I spread myself wide

beneath what heat was left, greedy for burning. Critics

compared Pollock to the sun, Krasner to a stunted thing

left in the shadow cast. An understory blight. A mere

woman. Of course, they didn’t see what was there—

they had stared so long at the sun, they had holes for eyes.

Meghan Sterling

Meghan Sterling (she, her , they) is a queer/bi writer and mother. She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry and others. Sick Letters from the Lovebed (Harbor Editions) is forthcoming in 2026. Poet laureate of Gardiner, Maine, read her work at meghansterling.com.

Jim Woodson

Jim Woodson, a distinguished Texas painter, has spent more than five decades crafting a unique visual language rooted in the rugged terrains of the American Southwest. In 2013, Woodson was named State Visual Artist by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Exhibitions include: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; George W. Bush Presidential Center; Dallas Museum of Art; Fort Worth City Hall; The Grace Museum; WiWe Museum. Press includes The New York Times; DFW Magazine; Artsy; Fort Worth Magazine; The Dallas Morning News; Glasstire; Art and Antiques Magazine; Fort Worth Star Telegram. His work is held in numerous public collections.