The Apartment Below

A body was wheeled out of the apartment downstairs yesterday.
Shiny black van in my parking space,
practiced precision,
stark silver stretcher,
red leather cushion —
disappearing into the apartment below.

Was it the one under me,
where I’ve seen children
and that man who smokes in his sandals?
Or the one next door,
where once I saw an old woman
who complained about peanut shells
left by crows I secretly fed?

In black uniforms —
bearing out their practiced proficiency —
on just one of many pilgrimages.

Their quarry draped in red velvet
with a brass zipper,
my neighbor I’d never seen
until now,
ferried across sunlight and bright green grass
on a hired gurney,
these two shepherds of the dead.

Who are you? Who were you?
So long I’ve lived here,
and not even know.
Were you the one who cursed my crows,
or some other?

People move in and out so often, you see —
I don’t bother to know.
Behind my door is a world
where my cat watches the neighbors
and judges them,
and I am in meeting after meeting,
or preparing for each storied routine.

The world could pass —
these walls are the same.
But I never thought
who comes for us
in the end.

Still, my neighbor died
beneath my floorboards,
their soul rising
through the ceiling where I trod the other side,
and could have paused —
looked at me in my bed,
wondering at me instead.

*

Tara Vassallo Consiglio is a poet from California now living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work explores inheritance, myth, desire, and memory—drawing from her Sicilian roots, fire-scarred landscapes, and the quiet legacies that linger after rupture. “The Apartment Below” is her first published poem and is part of a debut collection-in-progress.