Sun-Blind Vision & visionary
Dion O’Reilly Poetry
Sun-Blind Vision
To call the field last days
would be wrong
as well
to name the world
winged beauty
for our own good
when we understand things are
everything
tiny worlds inside them
of unseen food
the wafer is also a body
why not say it? Our lungs, the trees
a scream
from the north wind of our throat.
to call it unending drought
and to call the oaks dead
that would be the wrong way
when the firmament becomes
meant to kill us
not bodies but
they contain
their own inner jungles
the way we understand
the wine blood, the air
the whole damn thing,
Visionary
Turns out there’s a difference
between a halo and a crown,
between one meant to love me
and a nest of snake-dead eggs,
between kingdoms of kelp weaving a dark sea
and my head underwater, held there
by a big sister’s hand.
Different, but real, like a new dialect
I hear but do not know,
a gender I’m not,
but wish to be,
a region I flee to
for the sake of a pregnant daughter
and this town,
without rain enough
or homes enough
to live in without
giving your body
day and night to an angry god.
Different, but not my country,
not my currency,
not my sister.
But green, this other world.
So green, it aches.
Dion O'Reilly’s debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was shortlisted for The Catamaran Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, will be published by University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press in 2024. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates private workshops and hosts a podcast at The Hive Poetry Collective. Most recently, her poem "The Value of Tears" was chosen by the poet Denise Duhamel as winner of the Glitter Bomb Award. Find more of her work at dionoreilly.wordpress.com.