Dion O’Reilly

Revelry at Nineteen

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A year after the fire took most of me,

after my back became blood soup,
and it seemed my lost beauty—
when beauty was everything—

was a kind of sin,

the dogs found me in the barn—
three reddish ones, coyote-like
with all-seeing eyes,

a thick-coated Alpine type,
and a big poodle,
her bouffant grown out.

They circled me and sat,

turned their faces skyward
like upward pointed arrows,
and we howled

all morning, all afternoon,
until hunger, cold,
or maybe some unheard

whistle sent them home.
Whatever I’d suffered,
they came to partake,

like sharing wine or meat.

When the flames ate me,
when I heard
the ravenous cackle

on my dying skin,
I stayed silent,
but that day, with those dogs,

once I’d started, it was all
I wanted—song
and speechless celebration.

It would be years
before my words returned,
and I spoke again

in a human tongue.

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Dion O’Reilly is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator, Ghost Dogs, and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, The Slowdown, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran. She splits her time between Santa Cruz, California and Bellingham, Washington.