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Hilary Sallick is the author of love is a shore (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023), which is on the 2024 longlist for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Asking the Form (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Permafrost, Potomac Review, Jet Fuel Review, Notre Dame Review, Ibbetson Street, Small Orange, and other journals. She served as vice-president of the New England Poetry Club from 2015 to 2024. A teacher with a longtime focus on adult literacy, she lives and works in Somerville. (www.hilarysallick.com)

Within It

Hilary Sallick

For months I’ve been watching the builders
at work on the house behind ours—
how they toss a tool, a word, a plank
neatly one to the other, their movements  
in concert.
There’s the sound of hammering,
of conversation and laughter.
They’re using ropes, ladders, drills,
running up the rungs,
never missing a step. 
They remind me of an orchestra,
the musicians in their places
using instruments with great feeling,
or of dancers
with their bodies making forms
in time and space.
I think of all our projects,
how the shape of the container matters,
how we position ourselves within it
and in relation to each other.
Last night rain and wind buffeted my walls.
The windows rattled
in a relaxed responsive way.
I was walking up the stairs.
I was thinking about you
and everyone in particular,
feeling my own great wholeness
including you, not excluding
anyone, as I climbed
the steps with the ancient
dirty carpet tacked on decades ago
by others who lived here
before us.
Now a young worker with swinging gait
strides to his post,
his blond forelock hanging
down his brow, his hammer
in his right hand, swaying
a rhythm.

— Hilary Sallick