The Brink

by Hilary Sallick

After the negotiations
the emails and phone calls the effort
to reassure or defy after
the rolled eyes the lack of compassion
the fury and tantrum after not letting them
put one over on us the sober and drunken
certainty after shame
at having thus exposed oneself
after storming off or brushing
it aside after all of this
there’s the hollow
resonant-with-bird-voices now the whoosh
of cars through humid air
where light is touching every iota
where robins dance
over damp earth
faint silver streak
of rain against the far-off buildings
and two mockingbirds
fly under and past
one another
flashing their white-barred
wings making their calls

Here is a place
a bench in a city a perch
on a branch where one can be
a bit of weightless gravity a
potential stirring
extravagant late summer
flowers flowers flowers
ropes and vines and stems
petal-burst pressing from the center knot
where honeybees
hover alight creep
Where was I what was I
saying it’s almost dusk
I am on the brink my eye swarms
the flowers
and I watch people climbing
into cloud descending
to garden where to from here I wonder
somewhere surely hidden
vehicles in the distance
up close the machinery
of the pollinators

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Hilary Sallick is the author of two full-length collections, Love Is A Shore (forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books) and Asking the Form (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Small Orange Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Inflectionist Review, Empty House Press, Ibbetson Street, and other journals. She teaches reading and writing to adult learners in Somerville, MA, and is vice president of the New England Poetry Club.