DS MAOLALAI - POEMS

DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016) and "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019)

Vitamins, freshness, health.
​

​devouring carrots,
sweet
as red fruit
with potatoes, broccoli
and a couple of glasses
of wine. I boil them
until they are soft
and eat them
hunched over
with my fingers,
taking them in,
whole mouthfuls at a time.
 
my girlfriend
is a kitchen
musician;
prepares symphonies
with the roaring wok and oil -
chicken spins
waltz-pacing, spices
scatter
and sweet potatoes
roast hard
in buttery sauce
like a brass trumpet. I like it;
there's food sometimes
you want to eat,
but alone
I'm not interested
in anything
but whistling.
 
at home
my meals are a tune
hummed by a man
hammering wood
with his mind on something - not caring much
for flavour, I aim at true simplicity;
vitamins, freshness, health,
all out of the earth.
and being able to leave the room
and not worry
as the pot
boils over.
 

Adultery.
​

​I'd bang them out,
wine-drunk and excited,
and send them off
to magazines. I had
a list;
ones which liked me
and ones I liked
and I'd fire
unedited
like a shotgun
scaring birds. each one
I'd submit
5 times
to different places. then I'd wait
for any
to come back.
 
in general
it started with rejections;
someone would say
they didn't like a poem
so I'd open the laptop file
and straighten its teeth a little,
patch up wounds and blacken its hair
like a dealer with a tired racehorse.
and send it again, somewhere else. it was pleasing
to do this
with my evenings - this mild commission
of poetic adultery.
 
eventually
one would be accepted
sometimes, but since at any time
five versions
were floating, often
it wasn't the most recent. then they'd print it,
happy with the words I'd replaced
and I'd smile
and hope the other versions
were bad enough
that no-one else would want them.
 
a note for any editors
considering this poem:
the exceptions, of course,
were the ones
I sent to you.
 

Dublin:

very poetic
for a certain kind of poetry.
and very walkable:
you can take stroll
if you want to
on the same streets as Joyce did
and see pretty much
the same thing;
town
gone stagnant
beyond the addition
of a plastic line to the shopsigns
and electric wires
running to grumble. but there's this pressure here
and everywhere
a dusty grey of bookshops – the broken pottery
in your grandmothers house
almost impossible to endure.
Americans are lucky - when they walk around
the towns they have,
all they have to get them down
are politics.
 ​

The eviction.
​

​they could have charged more
so close to downtown
but they didn't,
and I always paid my rent - a worthwhile
investment
on their part. once
they sent me a message
to say the keys had been changed
and new ones
had been dropped under
my doorway. this guy
across the hall
had been evicted, apparently,
and they were worried
he'd try to get
back in. unfortunate - he was the only one who knew me
and when I knocked
after work
on someone else's window
to ask if I could get upstairs
to my new keys
they thought I might
be him. I called the landlord
and waited in an alley - he was there too,
wanting to talk to her. we traded cigarettes
and shared
a half-bottle of wine
and he told me it was all
a misunderstanding. I was worried
he might confront her
and I'd have to step in -
but he didn't. just followed us up the stairs,
asking if he could collect his oranges
and some shirts
he'd left behind.
 

The inventor
​

​laying tracks
to the bathroom from my bed.
I'm sick
of getting up in the night
to piss - this new
pneumatic system
should solve
most of my problems. it didn't though.
weeds grow
in every garden; you can hardly bar the wind
from handing over seeds.
I lie on my side
and slash into a cylinder, but then
I find I also want
a glass of water. also,
my girlfriend
left me
for someone who smells better
and I think
I'm developing
a cold.