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Dion O'Reilly
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the poet
Dion O'Reilly has authored three collections of poetry: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry and The Ex Ophidia Prize (now the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest), Ghost Dogs, which won a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and which was also shortlisted for both the Eric Hoffer Book Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Limerence, a finalist in the John Pierce Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown and elsewhere. A poetry workshop leader, Dion is also a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader, and a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective.
the poems
Old Black Water
Suzie, I want to tell you
how frequently I pass the apartment
behind the supermarket
where we street-danced
to the Doobie Brothers,
light shifting as the fog
lifted, front-yard roses
iridescent in the salt-gray
seaside morning.
You died, what, ten years ago?
Not at once, really, though pills
took you quickly. It began, I think,
when we were children: without
knowing why, we wanted out
of that rural beauty—the narrow
valley and gleaming stream,
summers spent diving off
crumbling cliffs, as if nearness
to death was the closest
we came to leaving
your stepdad's beery fingers,
my Mother who loved
to touch the sweaty chests
of her daughters’ teenage lovers.
Nowadays, everything
is a different kind of dangerous:
Rain stays away. June mist
sucks away too soon,
sunlight breaks through
before it should.
What I want to say, Suzie,
is a moment, gone,
fifty years, is just a moment,
but you’re still here, unfleshed
in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan—
our arms looped as we turn
tight circles, round and round,
your eyes locked on mine.
Dark Matter
We see so little of the world, a mere corner,
they say, though today, nothing seems scanty—
the oaks around the meadow, full of spiked leaves and fear-
ful band-tails, life’s matrix pulsing every nerve—it’s more
than more: it’s a slow explosion, even if its plenty
is mere sliver next to the dark ether
that sticks the planets, the stars, even our charged
cells to its vision board. It hurts me—
this seen beauty, the gleaming outsides of the world.
I don’t know why, but inside every spring, a memory—
some lost boy, the blooming weed he picked me,
his warm hands, the longing, the pleasure.
I know gratitude is popular, is inclined to go viral,
but it’s whack-a-mole, this old need inside me,
so when I hear dark matter—how I desire
dark, how I yearn for matter—
that intriguing reversal of uncertainty
into mass and import—
even in my golden-years-
garden—meant to uplift me—it’s shadow I seek,
the wormy layer, always there, year after year, closer
and closer—nameless god, forgotten father, limbic odour
of mystery,
its source, almost remembered, familiar,
beyond my reach.
Wading in Soquel Creek
I still go there—vale of my childhood,
nearly unreachable,
water-carved furrow to the sea.
When I wend around a certain curve,
I see my old friend Kev,
ghost-slumming at the water hole.
He’s still fourteen, still smoking
in a surplus jacket,
rubbing ashes on his jeans,
still bears the silence
of the fatherless,
never mentions why his mother left him
to live with Gran’ma Muster in her motorhome.
And I, too, kept my mother’s secrets,
the way she rewrote my life
with loops of cursive
on my back—
her whip, an instruction,
in the only language she knew.
Kevin, why don’t you wade with me again?
Like I thought we would forever,
listening to the water’s answers
to problems we couldn’t name.
Publishing credits
Old Black Water: New Ohio Review (Issue 34)
Dark Matter: won first place in The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Wading in Soquel Creek: Taj Mahal Review (Vol. 20, No. 2)