Can we imagine such emptiness? Such quiet?
Every bit of it, gone: the jackal-mouthed
and gospel-wild, razor wire

keeping out the needful
of our kind, even the ruins of holy cities,
flattened by viral belief.

We have no proof of our own
definitive end.
No name for the never-seen,

for the tangle of worms and beetles
thriving on us,

no name
for whatever creature
comes next: but let them be

thoughtless,
cleaned of reason, dumb
as water,

only a trace of us
left inside them
and above them

and everywhere they look.

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Dion O’Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator (University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press, 2024), Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020), and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Narrative and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

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