Nights full of houseplants
life full of laughter on all
of my chairs. dinners being eaten.
people sitting. dragging them over.
the room full of lively
debate. and then
sometimes nights
full of houseplants as well
whispering to each other
in poetry. books – urban birds
in a shuffling roost
on my bookshelves.
the cutlery stacked by the sink
like silver grass stood on frosty
dry mornings. a glass of red wine
on the table. seeing it. sipping it.
the keyboard and movement
of fingers.
Damp silence
dropping my brother home
after a dinner. we’re quiet
together. companiable:
occasional pertinent words.
the dog in the back seat
is fussy and whimpering
as she watches light flicker
from the street through a drawn blind
of rain. we pass by the bars.
people smoke out in damply
held silence. he drinks from a half-
empty bottle of table-wine
our parents couldn’t finish and told him
he might as well take.
he offers a swig and I take it
then hand it back quickly
to wrestle the shift toward a turn.
at a light pull ahead
of a bus which gives voice
with a horn and pulls sharp
to the back of my bumper.
my wife’s at a show in the city
with a guy friend of hers – he recently split
with his girlfriend. no, it’s fine. look –
I trust them implicitly. behind us
my sister clears the table of plates
and her wife has a chat with my mother.
my dads back in front of the football already
with a blanket and a hot cup of tea.
Tubbercurry
his mother’s cat got into a skip.
he says she spent two weeks
in the dump in tubbercurry.
they left out some food – she’d eat it
but stayed wild for ages.
eventually fish on a windowsill
lured her in. it must have been delicious:
like biting a riverboat’s wake.
and the guys in the office called her captain
which wasn’t her name. they knew
what it was, and they kept her
until someone could get a lift up.
after, she wouldn’t eat kibble at all
for almost a week and a half.
— DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has been nominated thirteen 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)