Brandon O'Brien's Portfolio
a sample of some of my poetry, fiction, and tabletop writing
Poetry
Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast
(cw mentions of intimate partner violence)
Via Beauty and the Beast, a young man struggles to reconcile the harm he has suffered with the fear of being made monstrous by it.
I want to feel the mem’ry of the thing burst sweet
against incisors. All I do is eat.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon is your father
(cw mentions of child abuse)
A young persona likens his own monstrous form with the harms of family neglect and distrust.
Ma does tell me I just like my father.
These days, down to the exhaustion.
Anansi Braids Your Stepson's Hair
A parent watches on as their young stepchild learns how to survive high school from the weaver of stories himself.
There are worse reasons
for a boy like him to learn to spin a lie.
drop some amens
When people's prayers are answered, they come from the heavens in the most intense form: as bombs.
The Holy Barons rumble through
the untended slum-gardens against the highway
and drop payloads.
Fiction
They Will Take You From You
An alien race has selected various 'geniuses' to help humanity grow, at the cost of seizing their bodies and minds after death--including an elderly artist whose grandson slowly discovers a racist undertone in the way they are claimed.
The Howling Detective
(cw mention of child abuse)
The story of a murder from two perspectives: the police officer recounting his failure to arrest the victim for assault, and the desk jockey who uses a newly discovered beastly transformation to seek justice on his own terms.
Hunger
A Side Story from the Magic: The Gathering set Zendikar Rising. The beleaguered vampire scholar Anowon seeks an expedition crew's unlikely assistance to prove a hypothesis about the plane's history, and offers to help them get revenge against a giant creature in exchange.
Fiction
The God of Spite and Violence
A TTRPG for one player and one GM (the Concierge), telling the story of the Angel, a hero laid low by tragedy, venturing into the opulent world of the Devil--the person who destroyed the Angel's once peaceful and loving home--in order to deliver revenge with their own fists.