For the Loneliness of Walking Out by Sheila Black

Praise for Sheila Black:

“In a just world Sheila Black would be recognized for who she is—one of our most precise chroniclers of the soul’s journey.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

Dawn Chorus
Those years the bed felt like a boat,
and our limbs were always pressed against
the limbs of sick children, the hair in the mouth,
the stumbling—floral, immense—down the hall
for the sticky, sickly, cherry-flavored medicine.
One coughed, then another; one turned
into a dream which made them moan in terror.
And the awake dry-mouthed mother who
believes/has learned the dream is merely life.
But what joy in that wide bed, the birds in their
dawn chorus, the trickster ones who sang
in the middle of the night as if to say moon
was sun, time was not or would not ever be
as it had been. An owl coughs from a tree.
A child coughs back. Later we would think
we had thought this forever—our bodies tied
to them as if by thin moonlight threads,
but it was only a season, a rotation. The
swallows’ nests left behind each year to
crumble into dust, littering the back porch
with their intricate broken weaving.

About the Author

Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections and three
chapbooks. Her most recent collection is Radium Dream (Salmon
Poetry Ireland, 2022). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New
Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), named a Notable Book
for Adults for 2012 by the American Library Association. She is a
2012 Witter Bynner Fellow with the Library of Congress, for which
she was selected by Philip Levine. Poems and essays have appeared in
Blackbird, The Birmingham Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The
Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in San Antonio,
TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G.
Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).