A life like this – home
on a bright Thursday evening.
Typing a poem in the kitchen.
The apartment is not
a small room with a bed
in the corner and smoke-
yellowed wallpaper, rent
paid in cash to a fat-
muscled, frightening
man, but the birds,
which I hear waking up,
are still seagulls
descending like paving
stones, fighting for dropped curry
trays. The sunlight still filters
through badly-hung curtains
like a cat between grass
hunting pigeons.
And having a wife is no
different to having a girlfriend
except that I let her
read some of the poetry,
and then after we fight
she’s still here. For so long I thought art
was a thing to be struggled
through, something to stalk
against, spring at and fence
like a man with a knife in a t-shirt
and thigh boots, dodging the teeth
of a pig. Art is the way the world
wakes up at nightfall, with clear
skies and clouds ganging
over horizons. How light
comes in ice upon soot
blackened, towering, brick
stained with piss at knee-level
and with blocked-gutter
water, like a window
on a 3am burger shop.
D.S. Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has nominated twelve times for Best of the Net, eight for the Pushcart Prize and once for the Forward Prize, and has been 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).
