Dion O’Reilly
Okanogan 1980
Half the time, I was high on something
I’d picked out of cowshit in the Skagit
or bought for fifteen bucks from a dodgy stranger.
But that day, nothing but a stack of pancakes,
bleeding blue from blackberries,
bought at a coffee shop in Marblemount.
In a field outside Tonasket, I saw a drum,
big as a trampoline— twelve native men
singing around it. The one named Red
suddenly swelled huge, his face merging
with the Cascades to the west.
He said he’d found an egg in a ground nest,
its cracks caked with yolk. A yellow-bellied
snake curled around it—half dead,
flaking its skin. The thin sound of pipping
within told him Mount St. Helens was about to blow.
The next Sunday, she did, as Jami and I
drove back to Seattle, hot air blowing
through the rolled-down windows. Smell of lemon
and dirt. Scrubby flatlands scraped by ancient glaciers.
Cataclysms, rent valves of the earth, floods—
like a peep show behind a curtain
we were too young to see.
We heard on the radio—Spirit Lake was gone,
half the mountain pulverized. To the eye of the sun
we looked like ants. Displaced,
feelers akimbo, missing what we’d come for.
That night, we slept in a field we thought was empty,
awakened to a train, the roar gaining
on us, thundering up from the dirt
through our bodies—six feet from steel rails,
invisible in the black. The night lit
by a single eye, bright as death.
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.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.