Read More: A brief Q&A with Dion O’Reilly
Watching a Brood Hatch with my Mother
It’s the way she loves, these small moments
with the chicks. Their fuzz lights her like a lamp.
Every time one pecks and flounders, weak from its egg, she whimpers
like a mammal, touches my hair. It moves me
too, the insides becoming outsides, the hidden becoming
real, the mother hen, no hands, just warmth and waiting.
Being born, they look like small hairy hearts
beating in a cracked chest. We see them through the shell splits,
unfolding flesh, before they break out, fluff their yellow dress.
One of the babies can’t get out, or won’t. Mother
smashes it, and it lies on the gravel, seamed eyes that never
open. It makes me sick, but I understand her.
She’s built them a house with a lay-box and perch.
It isn’t for nothing she feeds them. They better hatch.
World Books
When my mother threw encyclopedias at us,
she threw the world: mammals of North America,
Doric columns and eggplants. Giraffe necks.
Bustles, empire dresses, pale, pushed-up breasts.
She threw color plates of striped beetles. She threw The Beatles.
Hot air balloons, the race to the moon. Jackie’s pill hat,
the putative curse of Communism. She threw burned witches
of The Inquisition. Gray-toned photos of bristlecone pines
like Old Testament prophets glaring at the sky.
The books winged like startled doves, fluttered scattershot.
Into my father’s face, the back of my head, my sister’s lumbar.
Oh, World Books, implements of a mother’s fits, her unread
history, uncracked cipher. Unseen Rosetta. Her Gnostic Gospel
rotting in a Coptic jar.
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Object Permanence
When you knew pop tarts still lived when the toaster pulled
down, and after the Pontiac drove out the driveway, your dad
was still alive somewhere making money, when you understood
the postal carrier with his blue shorts and pouched chin existed
in a house beyond your front porch, that he didn’t pour into air after dropping
a parcel. You learned faith, really, in the power of maples to reappear, the pollen,
spring after spring, to grace the air. And your own face, when
the light delivered it, still glistened the mirror. It was a fall to the worn […]
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Dion O’Reilly has spent most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her debut book, Ghost Dogs, (Terrapin Books 2020) has been short listed for a number of prizes including the Catamaran Poetry Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award. Her work appears in American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Dion O’Reilly