Metal Lifers

By Patrick O'Reilly

Greggie Fowler took a compass
and carved the word
             SLAYER
                           into his arm.
They sent him to the nurse.
That boy bled everywhere. God
I wish I loved anything half as much
as balding men in battle-jackets love Satan.
 
I look over my balcony
and see precious little worth mutilating myself over.
The prima ballerina’s bony ankles,
the coloratura sharpened to a shriek,
the lover I imagine jealously
tracing their finger over
and over
S-L-A-Y
              L-A-Y
 ­                        L-A-Y-E-R
    Y-E-R-S
 
Runes. Ghosts. Etc.
I suppose it must have scarred.
It seemed deep at the time.

---

Verdant Sea

By Patrick O'Reilly

after an Instagram video from @queenofinfinitespace

1.
 
Embroidery of greens and wheats;
white where the wind turns
the leaves like tarot.
 
In the background, the sound of a Spotify playlist
titled “Dying Summer Vibes”
 
Ragweed eyes, adjust the brightness,
lower the volume,
 
zoom in on
the grasses swaying
then Google their names

2.
 
                           Webs
 
 
                                                       Between
 
 
 
                                            Branches hold
 
 
                   Raindrops, Pixels

3.
 
Like lying down in digital grass is cool, real
cool ’cause it’s deep and dark like
the sun’s glitched out for microsecond,
like the 2D has climbed through to the 3D
and you’ve found a way to climb deep
into the deep deep grass, rain-full web, crawl
deeper, deepest, into the screen

​4.
 
Cybersex:
 
cicadas make
modem bleats.

---

The Village Mall in Decline

By Patrick O'Reilly

Sears pulled out in October,
the Buck-or-Two not long after.
Then the green neon sign
that once read DANIER LEATHER
vanished from the southern wall;
in its place were rivet holes
and the faint trace of letters
which conjured thoughts of
   dry creek beds
and branches stripped with frost.
By Christmas Eve,
            the pet shop's resident
parrot refused to eat or talk.
                                        The sudden
proliferation of folding gates
suggested the arrival
of a bigger, badder bird:
Charlie picked his feathers, paced,
and glared
                   through the chests of the shiftless,
beaten cashiers.
 
 
Last summer, I jimmied the locks
and found the water feature flush
with larvae
and arum.
and a foal, stopped to drink,
who whipped her head around and bolted
up the green escalator when I stepped
too heavy on a plastic hanger. She vanished
between two
moth-prickled, ghostly chemises
at La Senza     as rain    shuttered
down through the ruined skylight.

---

Babayaga

By Patrick O'Reilly

Our mother made the best of it
while father was away:
she ground the pastilles for our lungs
and mixed them with our stew,
 
she boilt the laundry, nudged the bread.
The house was draughty (not her fault)
and often strayed from where we left it.
Our mother did her best.
 
Coming home from school we’d see,
like a scalded dog, her face rear back.
We drained our mother dry and flat;
if she ate bones, we ate them, too.

---

Patrick O’Reilly is an archivist and writer from Renews, NL, currently living in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. His first chapbook, A Collapsible Newfoundland, was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2020. A follow-up, Demographic Report, November 2023, is forthcoming this fall with Cactus Press.

Instagram: @lunar_maria_rilke