Hilary Sallick
Winter 2025 | Poetry
small city
we don’t need to know
our neighbors’ names
or the species
of the trees growing
here and there between
our houses along the road
knowing instead
their seasons and moods
who sleeps late who smokes
who has dogs who children
who keeps their leaves long
into November who hosts squirrels
and chickadees who survives
Hilary Sallick is the author of Love is a Shore (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023), long-listed for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award; and Asking the Form (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). Her poems appear in Permafrost, Potomac Review, Notre Dame Review, Ibbetson Street, and elsewhere. She served as vice-president of the New England Poetry Club from 2016 through 2024. A teacher with a longtime focus on adult literacy, she lives in Somerville, MA. (www.hilarysallick.com)