[POETRY]

[12/01/25]

A Skull Full of Stitches

Five Poems by DS Maolalai

The road and long necked birds

loving the road,
how it burns ahead
brightly;
loving corners,
their flow and their banks
against buildings
which thus damn
and alter the path—
as if water could be turned
back by anything.

and splashing
with the shadow
of long-necked,
-legged wading birds,
the twisting, the intercourse
and beak-
skewered creatures—wild frogs.

I am not a frog. I am
a leaf; a piece
of a leaf. the way which I twist
in the current. move
with the road
and move on.

It’s fine.

he offered: if I wanted
I could speak with his class. a brother-
in-law of a friend of mine and successful
magazine editor, well-liked by the academic
poetry crowd. he taught composition
at a good university.
came from California—didn't want
to go back. I was a little drunk
at the time: Fallon in the country
from Switzerland for Christmas—
we'd met in a bar up
in Stoneybatter. no I said. I can't stand those
MFA writing-type classes. frankly I think
that they crush out all style. listen, he told me,
I was being polite. I don't know you but he (thumb)
told me you’ve written some poems.
don’t worry about it. it's fine.

My friend in Paris

a friend is in paris. he sends me a photo
of steps from the peak of montmartre.
this view of the city is unusually
beautiful, especially lit up
at night. the last time I saw it
I woke up in french hospital—
a skull full of stitches, a fracture a moderate
haemorrhage. burst like a september
horse chestnut shell open on a half-
built stone wall in clonakilty. flew home
two days later and didn't drink beer
for a month—and then drank a while afterward
carefully. it's a cloudy day over there –
a cloudy day here. in my dublin apartment
I see all the paris that he does.

Bisque weather

all day the weather
is a kitchen of overboiled
soup. even a beer
wouldn't cool. even
an ice gin and tonic.
a man stands outside
with a cigarette, ass
on his windowsill. his gut shifts
as he does, with the breeze,
like rotisserie chicken.
smoke dangles over him:
an overused rag.

American Countryside

the banking of clouds to the west
hid the sunset. it was grey—the same
darkness from night in the east rolling on.
he was on a bus heading from Toronto
to Chicago. and he hadn't ever thought much
about North American countryside—and now
he couldn't see it: supposed it was likely the same.
the drive took 15 hours—he regularly
did this. not go to Chicago but drive overnight
which was cheaper than flying and meant
one less night in hotels. but it was difficult
nonetheless, sleeping with everything out there—
this openness, hung like a drying duvet.
occasionally they stopped for an hour
for toilets and smoke-breaks, which stretched
out the journey. the best one was Kalamazoo—
banks and the bus station hunched
in a brown brickish square like pigeons
on a roost in an underground carpark ledge
shouldering each other in the chest.  

DS MAOLALAI has been described by one editor as "a cosmopolitan poet" and another as "prolific, bordering on incontinent." His work has been nominated fourteen times for BOTN, ten for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and released in three collections; "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016), "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022).