Daniel T. O’Brien

TOXIC 

We are all being good Marxists: our childhood dogs raw-red against the pot-holed pavement, barking. O, my little dogs. Yearning for a less ugly mess to be born in. Who are they, corrupting the minds of our youth? With the taste of their lips, I’m on my way…Word comes. Words come. Someone is guilty of. Declarations are made by The Estate. HOA. 401K. The adults are children trapped inside Big Bodies. They don’t want to be free. Free Britney. RIP Whitney. All the empty drawers of salvation, these green Eden gardens grown along freeways, and on rooftops. We shoop-shoop. We free willy. Too much trick in the system. Too much Christian. The end of democracy cried out Socrates. Dear power-wealth-welding: try this Hemlock Cocktail at the May Day parade. We shine jewelry with cyanide. A silver sliver of risk. Tisk, tisk, I’m choking my Daddy at the Standard Hotel. I bite the chain of fools. Change exchanges hands. Who isn't hiding from whom? Reproductive futurism. Deep sleep and a daydream. Lil Nas X sending me, happily, to my little hell in a hand-basket. O, skeleton book of lewks. O queer apothecary, elix me a mixy, man-killing matriarchy to smoke with, this cigarette. O, Julie Newmar. O, Miss Sissy. O, every inch of Hollywood’s poison pen with which we could never write a better future. I’m bussy, unfinishing. Venom-soaked, I’m glistening. If I’m toxic, I’m rocket, shoot my ass to the moon.

I’M WORRIED ABOUT THE SLUTS ON THE INTERNET 

I’m worried about the 

sluts on the internet, 

not because they are 

sluts and not because 

they are on the 

internet but because 

the sluts on the 

internet are tweeting 

while slutting, 

theoretically, off the 

internet, so really still 

on the internet while 

slutting, and I just 

worry, ya know, that 

when Johnny is 

getting eaten out and 

tweeting that he is 

getting eaten out that 

he isn’t really getting 

eaten out and then I 

worry that when I am 

on the internet and not 

getting eaten out that I 

will never get eaten 

out and then I realize 

maybe nobody is 

getting eaten out 

because we are all on 

the internet and 

nothing that happens 

on the internet is real.

RHINOCEROS

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep.

-EUGENE IONESCO

Daniel T. O’Brien is a maker-of-things living on Lekawe and Munsee Lenape land (Queens, NY). His writing has appeared in American Literary Review, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Kenyon Review, Prelude, VINYL, and other venues. He was the editor of a limited-release poetry anthology Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope (2020), distributed exclusively for independent bookstores throughout the US.