Soquel Creek
I still go there—vale of my childhood,
nearly unreachable,
water-carved furrow to the sea.
When I wend around a certain curve,
I see Kev’s ghost
slumming at a water hole.
He’s still fourteen, still smoking
in a surplus jacket,
rubbing ashes on his jeans,
still bears the silence
of the fatherless,
never mentions why his mother left him
to live with Gran’ma Muster in a motorhome.
And I, too, kept my mother’s secrets,
the way she rewrote my life
with loops of cursive
on my back—
her whip, an instruction,
in the only language she knew.
Kev, why don’t you wade with me?
Like I thought we would forever,
listening to the water’s answers
to problems we couldn’t name.
• • •
Dion O’Reilly’s early years were spent on an isolated family compound, subject to the whims of a culty sociopathic parent. Her debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was runner-up for The Catamaran Prize and shortlisted for The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book Sadness of the Apex Predator will be published by University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press in 2024. Her work appears in The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, Rattle, Narrative, The Slowdown, and elsewhere.