Absorbed Twin

The ghost is complaining,
her memories are a wind

I can do nothing about.
Pale ghost. Skinny ghost. Bird ghost
who gorges on drunken berries,

leaves a body smear on my window
I can’t bear to clean. Exhausted ghost.
Felon ghost. Ghost who lived with me

beneath the same ribs. Carved my past
like a glacier. Melted and left me
a burning sea of dust and playa.

Ghost who curled with me
inside our mother,
whom I took into my blood

in order to survive.
Did she die inside me?
Let me cough her up,

razor myself open.
I want another chance.

---

Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events, and she Zoom-facilitates ongoing workshops from an artsy farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains.