My Father Lives

if you can call it that, on a device they call a bed, but it’s more like a metal table from a
psychopath’s basement. I push a button and he floats up or tips back, but I never get it right, his
spine, bent in awkward complaint, and his lips, thin, which is strange because they were once
pillowy, almost lush, but now his foamy tongue escapes from his rimless mouth like a snake’s.

He wakes and tells me for three days he was held in a pit—not a dream, he insists, a kidnapping,
held for ransom at the Fairgrounds, the same place where he manned political booths for the
Democratic party. His old enemies were there, laughing, pointing at him as he raged in a hole,
and even a few of his allies, dead for fifteen years.

Did he start to die and go to hell, the dripping tube of antibiotics bringing him back to this
horrible cot, this dark room, to die again? He won’t let me open the curtains, so I sit
remembering how he threw me high into spring air and caught me, the apple blossoms gone
insane, shaking into wind like confetti after a great war. After his war. I felt crazy too when he
did that, like I was dissolving into papery pieces. Soon I will empty his urn into sodden air over a
cowfield. It will be fall, cold, the pieces will hit the ground in a heavy thump, then, like the wisp
of a ghost, some will rise again.


autumn chill—
I won’t live forever
but how sweet the apples

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Dion O’Reilly’s third book, Limerence, was finalist for The Floating Bridge Press John Pierce Chapbook Competition for Washington State Poets. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Tar Poetry Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, and Rattle. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads private poetry workshops, and is co-editor of En•Trance Journal. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.