Dion O’Reilly
Scavenged
…what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future…
—Dorianne Laux
When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back
and ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone,
I ran through the house, a contagion
cindering the couches and carpets.
Flayed, my fingertips peeled back
to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air,
light, and the steel cot where they took me.
The way, each day, they peeled me
like Velcro from my sheets,
left bits of my meat there.
Lowered me into Betadine,
and scrubbed me to screams—
that became my history. Scavenged
by the curious. They see my twisted fingers
and are hungry for the tale.
I’ve done the same, stared
at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it,
feel the cut bone under the knob,
hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know
how that man was alive, arms glistening
playing basketball from a high-tech chair,
making his shots.
The body’s scarred terrain becomes
consecrated field. We gather to pick
through the pieces that remain—
an ear hanging from its hinge of skin,
diamond stud in the lobe, a ring finger
shining with its promise-band of gold.
Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.
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