Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Four
November- December 2025
Roosting, poems by Damen O’Brien.
Roosting
The spoonbills arrive at dusk
settling themselves with the dignity
of some nineteenth century queen,
bowing like courtiers, they burn
in the orange sunset like rushlights,
they have a magic which is only
apparent in afterthought, they
thicken the ghost gum trees
as though white fruit. They are
suddenly everywhere, shifting
on the highwire of the whipping
uppermost branches. If they
cause any harm, I do not know it,
if any ill flows from their existence,
I cannot conceive of it. I wish
I could have their gentleness.
They flutter their wings like
opera capes, regain their balance
in the brown reach of branches,
disturb nothing. The spongy
dark smudges them out. It is
possible to live gently on this Earth.
I Married a Murderer
She calls me ‘my last husband’ and we laugh. She
shines for me like the glint on sharpened knives.
I’d never shop her to the cops, I’d never give
the pigs a tip. She doesn’t kill that many folks,
no more than influenza, say, or whooping cough,
way below malaria or the kills that cancer claims.
My wife is calm and cool and kind. The garden’s
never looked so good – seven vegetable beds
so far. And she’s so clean and neat. Fastidious
really, keeps her hair short, always wears gloves,
burns her clothing if they show a single spot.
I love her little ways. Her box of locks of hair,
her burner phone, the plastic laid on every floor.
I love my wife more than blood and bone
and death. I love her with my every dying breath.
The world is hard and cold and she’s no harder.
We have a relationship of honesty and trust.
Siegfreid and Roy loved Manticore. The scorpion
loved the frog. Rust loves iron. Sometimes
I pretend to sleep. I feel her eyes watching
me late into the night. She loves to watch me.
No matter who she’s murdered, I am sure
they deserved it, or if they didn’t deserve it,
they looked at her funny, or if not funny, they
happened to be passing. The point is she is
really loving when you get to know her.
Full of little jokes and pranks: she hides around
corners, makes me jump, she pulls the trigger
of empty guns behind my ear, she gives me
small electric shocks, she draws an invisible
knife across her neck and says ‘you’re next’.
Meteors have been known to wipe out planets
but my wife has never killed a dinosaur, forest
fires have been known to burn down country
towns but my wife has never set a fire. My wife
has never posed an existential threat like climate
change or nuclear proliferation. She’s a cuddly
teddy bear really. Mixes all my medicine herself.
Fixes the brakes on my car. I love my wife to death.
Poison Triptych
On one panel, the King who took a hundred tinctures
every day: a vial, sluggish with a hundred antidotes
washed down with watered wine, who never had
a slice of meat, or crust of bread that hadn’t first
been chewed or blessed by Tasters wiping crumbs
from off the corners of their plump conniving smiles
and though occasionally their face goes black or skin
sloughs off, or eyes weep blood, they’re mostly eating
better than the king. Does he look sick to you?
A little sallow, a little bit too gaunt? His sumptuous robes
of state, the sceptre in his hand can barely hide the palsy
in his grip. He takes a hundred antidotes a day, so far
they’ve kept his killers at bay. Unfounded and un-tested
cures that twist his gut and combine in unknown ways.
A small price: to stay well he must remain forever sick.
On another panel, his assassin fulminates – stick thin too
but dressed in black. He takes the smallest scraping
of the poisons he deploys. Tasteless, odourless, colourless
works of art – a grain or two, less than a pinch. A dusting
more would drop the strongest ox. A gulp enough, so that
if he accidentally imbibes his own thorny nicks, he might
survive the experience. He’s handled his potions for so long
he’s quite inured to dying and he knows: the only way
to live is to not to die, or more precisely, to only die
a little death each day. Does he seem a little lost to you?
A little scared? Assassins must see assassins everywhere.
Perhaps they are. The King invites him to dinner every day.
He draws his robes of non-descript around him like a tomb.
In the middle is no panel but a mirror and in it you who’ve
never had to deal with wounds given, nor have offered them
yourself, mostly unremarkable subject – you have to wonder
if you could get used to anything even death – that little assassin
hiding in your blood. If you would rather be unhappy every day
just to live or would you take poison in order not to die
or is there a secret middle way? The artist has not depicted it,
leaving the middle spot for contemplation because it is too hard
to fix with paint. The way that some people who are wronged –
who are hurt in ways that only ever man can find to hurt his
fellow man, can drink the poison knowing what it is, knowing
that it cannot make things any worse, who take the frothy
flagon from the tray and down it in one motion and forgive.
© Damen O’Brien
Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. Damen’s prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Writing Award and the Café Writer’s International Poetry Competition. In 2024 he won the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition, the Fingal Poetry Prize, the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize and the Grieve Hunter Writer’s Centre Prize. His poems have been published in the journals of seven countries including Aesthetica, Arc Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, Southword and Overland. Damen’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and highly commended in the Forward Prizes. His latest book of poetry is Walking the Boundary (Pitt Street Poetry, 2024).