Dion O’Reilly
Two Poems
Ode to Dolly P.
Of course, your breasts—
your Motherland. Your Big Sky.
Your greatness pulling you
forward and forward.
We want to live
in your cleavage.
Gaze at your long nails
as they tick the fretboard.
We will always love you—
your native talent. Your hard
core story and bird-call trill.
Your odd combination
of Realness and Display.
I watch you on Jimmy Kimmel,
your gliss lips and chalk-white,
piled-high perfection.
I feel like Frank O’Hara.
Don’t collapse, Dolly Parton.
Don’t Collapse!
If you die, we won’t believe
you’re gone. We’ll keep
sighting you alive
like Jesus or Earhart.
Whatever you do, don’t stop
tottering along our American streets
in your dagger-sharp, blood-red,
open-toed pumps.
Girl, you’re all we’ve got left.
Prince Charles, Your Mother Won’t Die
I imagine that verge feeling
of waking a second before
the alarm and the alarm
never sounds
so you can’t get up.
Is it hard, even for a prince,
to count his blessings?
Aren’t you like a child who can’t sleep
on a kidnapper’s
1000-count sheets?
What a lovely hell—days and days
of perfect drought,
her long life pulling
eternity’s golden bow,
arrow notched and waiting
knuckle pointing
at an unending century
of Corgis and commonwealth.
We watch you wait, wanting
the old world to exfoliate,
reveal the pink skin
of the young. But you’re not
young anymore, bitter prince
who never mounts a throne.
Will we ever know
the green garden of your hopes?
Every morning the sky
must seem like a diamond
of impressive size
on the thin finger
of your perpetually
unpopular wife.
—Submitted on 01/17/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series
Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.
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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 first inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
