Of course, it does. Everyone does.
The sky’s not blue, and the grass—
well—even in your first language,
green wears a different name,
and somewhere, in some universe,
I’ve heard one plus one is something else,
and the man I claimed
didn’t love me, now I say
he built a temple
of my youth. Even my childhood,
which I have discussed
at length, was not the moonscape
I made it seem. It was a mess
of stars, burnt palace,
a cataclysm of wonder.
Why, even now, my dying mother
sings her regret
with the sound of a singing bowl,
which rings and rings,
even after it ends, tolls
the cranium
like the so-called Om
they say made us,
about which we lie,
for who can capture
the song in our skin,
our fingers and feet,
our every shimmering cell?
–
Dion O’Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone 2024), Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books 2020), and Limerence, (Floating Bridge 2025). Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere.
