What Keeps Me Up
The wounded toes of ballerinas,
the violet shell of a grandson’s ear,
three small olives at rest
in their own green blood.
Twelve useless elixirs
I bought to heal my tension,
my tension deep,
so quivering deep,
my muscles wear me out,
but won’t let me sleep.
A pneumatic drill down the valley
echoes like a brakeless train.
Malarial clouds from western fires
drift across the fruited plains.
In the country of the homeless,
we’re wide awake, eyes bright
as nighttime cats.
There’s nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to sleep.
Lord, there’s nowhere to sleep
in the home of the brave.
· · ·
Sugar Habit
When Andrada visits, we drive downtown,
stroll Pacific Avenue, listen to untuned guitars
like we did when we were fifteen
before her mother killed herself,
and she moved away
with a new mom she hated.
I watch her pour tablespoons of Xylitol into Lipton tea,
swallow THC gummies, forage my fridge
for family-size chocolate bars.
I understand she needs to argue with me
that her Four-Square scripture could save
the gays and Catholics,
that her Twelve Steps and Paleo diet—
which she can’t follow—
are good for her,
like slitting the pale skin of a thigh
is better than slitting a carotid.
Besides, who am I to talk?
Even as I write this, I want to click away,
look at an old lover on Instagram,
Google the sister I don’t talk to,
revel in the the weird achievement
of peeling my cuticles till they bleed.
But next time she wants to visit, I’ll say No.
God knows, she drives me crazy,
but I hate to lose her. She’s the only one
who knew me when I was alone
on a tire swing, fingers scooping from a jar
of Empress jam, summer sleeping
like a parent who wouldn’t get up.
· · ·
Worm Moon
9 March 2020
Named for the blind one, her body of sticky pearl,
eater of the dead, eaten by the blood-breasted birds.
The Earth tugs at thunderheads, a hand of sky
fingers the soil, sun cuts the clouds,
and touches our winter-whitened skin.
Then they rise—the earth-loosed,
and slack-stranded, helpless, pink, like intestine writhing
under the black-bead eye of Crow.
Their rising reminds me to make plans— even before
she dies, for how to live without my mother—
the one I turned to God before I learned words,
who brought me to first light as Disappointment—
My sex wrong, my Hebrew hair,
my thickened waist, like unbaked bread.
Now is the night of the Worm Moon, Lenten Moon,
Sugar Moon, and Sap. Last full moon of winter, Chaste
Moon of the virgin spring.
Its persistent turn, night shadows and silver discs—
the closest we get to hope. We, the soft and shapeless,
the badly-made.
—Submitted on 01/14/2022
Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, and New Letters. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts, radio shows, and events, and she leads ongoing workshops with small groups of poets from all over the United States and Canada.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
