Walking the Neighborhood
Sheila Black | Poetry, Summer 2026
We talk about the swallows again—
the way they return and where are they
landing from to build their mud and grass houses.
Each year, the gray-pink corpses of the weaker
fledglings landing on the stoop, where we sweep
them up, bag them away. A mystery we don’t discuss:
What decides which one draws back, which one
chooses the journey into silence?
Today, a day of riot we didn’t see coming:
Electric the bougainvillea,
the wet cups of magnolia, and the cat sidling,
sidling, around and under the parked cars.
Tell me, how far can you go?
I take your arm and it shivers. Once, we skipped
down a street singing a sixties anthem.
The photograph in the drawer yellows, a sunspot
conceals your face. I am learning to unmake
myself as if in preparation, unboxing, yielding.
What will I conceal inside me forever?
How to bear the loneliness of continuance
or what it tells us about the solitude
of seeing? No matter. We walk the block,
then back, as if this were a journey on repeat.
Recovery—the story we tell ourselves. Ants
swarm the carmine peonies, the relationship
of irritation to beauty—without their ceaseless
scrabbling we have no flower—and the flower,
is it a pain or a delight? I don’t ask, you don’t say.
We speak instead of here, right here. May,
which we taste in the back of our throats.
An eruption, an interruption. Another small
quiet body, feet pointed upward. The one
who could not get over. The one who
watches as if from far away. How far, how
far will you go?
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“My father died in May 2022 of Parkinson’s. I was lucky enough to get to live with him for quite an extended period during this time. He had the freezing kind of Parkinson’s where to walk is a Herculean (and I wish I knew an adjective for that that is not so gendered!) effort; but my father—both stubborn and a goose-gone enthusiast for life to the very end – insisted on walking around the block every day, which took much longer than one would imagine. This poem comes from that—the details of his neighborhood. My parent’s house does have many house swallows; It is true that every year some of the fledglings die. I think the poem attempts to communicate the feeling one has watching the progression of a disease like Parkinson’s of how sweet and precarious ordinary time becomes—perhaps leavened with the dream that one is always walking alongside, even across Death.”
Sheila Black is the author of six poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her most recent collection is Cinnamon Fire (Next Page Press, 202f). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2026 Creative West Fellowship. Poems and essays have appeared in Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).
Walking the Neighborhood
Sheila Black | Poetry, Summer 2026
We talk about the swallows again—
the way they return and where are they
landing from to build their mud and grass houses.
Each year, the gray-pink corpses of the weaker
fledglings landing on the stoop, where we sweep
them up, bag them away. A mystery we don’t discuss:
What decides which one draws back, which one
chooses the journey into silence?
Today, a day of riot we didn’t see coming:
Electric the bougainvillea,
the wet cups of magnolia, and the cat sidling,
sidling, around and under the parked cars.
Tell me, how far can you go?
I take your arm and it shivers. Once, we skipped
down a street singing a sixties anthem.
The photograph in the drawer yellows, a sunspot
conceals your face. I am learning to unmake
myself as if in preparation, unboxing, yielding.
What will I conceal inside me forever?
How to bear the loneliness of continuance
or what it tells us about the solitude
of seeing? No matter. We walk the block,
then back, as if this were a journey on repeat.
Recovery—the story we tell ourselves. Ants
swarm the carmine peonies, the relationship
of irritation to beauty—without their ceaseless
scrabbling we have no flower—and the flower,
is it a pain or a delight? I don’t ask, you don’t say.
We speak instead of here, right here. May,
which we taste in the back of our throats.
An eruption, an interruption. Another small
quiet body, feet pointed upward. The one
who could not get over. The one who
watches as if from far away. How far, how
far will you go?
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“My father died in May 2022 of Parkinson’s. I was lucky enough to get to live with him for quite an extended period during this time. He had the freezing kind of Parkinson’s where to walk is a Herculean (and I wish I knew an adjective for that that is not so gendered!) effort; but my father—both stubborn and a goose-gone enthusiast for life to the very end – insisted on walking around the block every day, which took much longer than one would imagine. This poem comes from that—the details of his neighborhood. My parent’s house does have many house swallows; It is true that every year some of the fledglings die. I think the poem attempts to communicate the feeling one has watching the progression of a disease like Parkinson’s of how sweet and precarious ordinary time becomes—perhaps leavened with the dream that one is always walking alongside, even across Death.”
Sheila Black is the author of six poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her most recent collection is Cinnamon Fire (Next Page Press, 202f). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2026 Creative West Fellowship. Poems and essays have appeared in Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).