Ellen Dillon: Six Poems

FROM EVERY SONNET IS A CURVE

Even buzzards spend most of their day perched, sluggish and
inert, waiting for a shoe to drop, a cocked Glock, the stopped
clock to synch with the right time, to sink right through the
thermals to the sweet spot for current-gliding. Currently, I am
stumbling through the tangles of the day, too frazzled and
fuzzed up to move with anything approximating grace.
Approximate grace, how sweet the sound, quick zip or Velcro
rip and insides will be cascading out, blood-slicked, steaming.

I wanted to coil those entrails at your feet for anthropomantic
purposes, but you were watching football. Augurs ill, like
looking at birds sickly, no good will come of it. The sacred
chickens—air-fried, in a basket—won’t give up their secrets.
If a flock of birds came flying about any man it was an
excellent omen. Oh men among the chickens, read the signs.



Oh men among the chickens, read the signs.
Birds fall down from the sky, shot on sight
the second they appear in the Carpenters’ song.
The spectre of infinite recursion posed by song-in-song
spooked someone to the point of violence. It’s clear now
that we’re cursed, whether the auspices are ex avibus or
tripudiis. Neither flight nor scratching can be gleaned for
portents in a heap of plumage scavenged by the magpies.

Two for joy, four for a boy, fourteen for a sonnetful
of untellable secrets. No amount of measured stamping
thwarts their feeding, but if the augur cares to ponder
their antic motion, the flecks of thrush-flesh dropping
from their beaks, there is a story here of plundering,
of songbird as a foodstuff to fuel our frantic singing.

FROM NOT ON LIKE BIRDS BUT UNDER THE CURVE

                         My first poems teemed with
                            slugs—they were slick with
                            you—and the kitchen still does.
                            At night you climb the pipes
                            from the sludge-pool at the
                            gable end to tuck yourselves
                            away in bags of dogfood or
                            secrete yourselves in the
                            grooves between chopping
                            boards. Drúchtín, you are in
                            Irish, or seilide drúchta—little
                            dewdrop, dewy snail, a pet-
                            name for a small, cute person.
                            Could I teach myself to tolerate
                            your waves of soft incursion, to
                            mourn your bodies—pancaked
                            by chopping boards slapped on
                            the counter until your guts
                            extrude—if I could bring
                            myself to think of you as dewy
                            snails, as dewdrops, as pet-
                            names for a small, cute person?

                            This new shape IS refreshingly
                            soft—we have climbed up,
                            peeled off in our boneless
                            bodies named for dewdrops,
                            made ourselves a place among
                            the shaving foam and night
                            cream. Soon, those labels
                            mean nothing to us. We no
                            longer have the kinds of eyes
                            that make out words from
                            signs. Or ears to sieve them
                            from sound. That’s all above
                            our heads now anyway, flat
                            heads crowned with pairs of
                            retractable antennae. Our
                            optical tentacles will regrow if
                            we lose them and thanks to the
                            track laid out by our mucous
                            trail, we are never lost. But we
                            could be flattened by a board or
                            book, we live in fear of birds.




                            When I woke from the dream
                            where we were slugs, I was
                            softer. Things slid off. I
                            retraced my steps with ease.
                            Pour dampness down in the
                            stream sang Ryley’s guitar on
                            the drive home, and though I
                            wasn’t sure quite what he
                            meant I think I was doing it
                            anyway, driving my soft self
                            through rain and surface
                            water. Thinking of dampness
                            as something that you pour in
                            a stream felt weird but I went
                            with it. With oysters in a bag
                            under the back seat, for
                            shucking and cooking, as I
                            remembered just in time that
                            you can no longer tolerate
                            them raw after a bad time at
                            the Flaggy Shore.




                         I find myself: groundless but
                            not without ground,
                            foundering but somehow
                            found in translation—every
                            point of me moved the same
                            distance in the same direction.
                            Ryley’s fingers move like legs
                            of half a spider, spinning sound
                            out of air. The other half has
                            been transported across the x-
                            axis, is off making fine threads
                            to weave with, where we can’t
                            see. He’s smiling there. A great
                            weight has been lifted. His
                            shoulders feel elastic from
                            their unburdening. Ryley, if
                            you ever stop in Charleville
                            again, listen out for the rustling
                            ghosts of Cheese Queens past.
                            Their curdled dreams sour the
                            air around town, but the sound
                            is comfortingly rhythmic,
                            resonant with static buzz.

Ellen Dillon was 2025 Arts Council/ University College Cork Writer in Residence. Recent books include Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel (HVTN, 2023) tentatives (Pamenar Press, 2023) Butter Intervention (Veer 2, 2022) and Morsel May Sleep (Sublunary Editions, 2021) and her hybrid lyric essay/ apocalyptic verse novella How complete and final the feeling… is forthcoming with Broken Sleep in 2026. Her book of lyric essay and prose fiction, A Whale Called Milieu, was shortlisted for the inaugural Prototype Prize for ‘writers and artists working at the intersections of different literary and artistic forms.’