I Lived in the Woods 

I thought I lived in the woods.
I thought of the woods
   but was afraid most of the time:
I’m
remembering now.

Cleaved to my island, the house
on hill, by sea, the houses.
I sweated up slopes,
in love and hopeless,
    my woodstove face

jealous for no good reason. The one
I should have known
was not my friend:
the end
of a self in the sere gray woods,

the ravine
where no one who loved me stood.

ξ

Mary Sunshine 

She was a boy, I guess — the joke —

put her in gloves, a red cocktail gown.
Let her arch her ankles for the crowd,
play with her pearls.

In the audience, a little thing watched her, me,
looked at the lady she made. Blue along one jaw
where the spot hit it. Blushing mouth in an o I knew

wrapped around Vivian’s hidden voice. Hello
in me, in the funny bit —
it spat, when I saw him laughing, after,

with large, unlovely athletes.

ξ

Chatelaine 

The lights on, the lights on. Waking up, and they were on all night.
They do a little something to the day. Leftovers, messages,
a person in the corner. Who lives here, who stays? I’m not
the owner, I’m the chatelaine. I have so many keys.
At my waist, right here, where moving comes from. I bend
and pick up. I bend in bed, stay still. My wrist
keeps working, even when I’m tired. When I would stop,
a pinch inside will hold me up. Till this
is done. I opened the window: light let out,
let in. Beginning where I begin.

ξ

Liam October O’Brien grew up on a small island. Some of his recent work can be found in Denver Quarterly, the Bennington Review, and Nightboat Books’ We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. He received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He lives in New York.