D.S. Maolalai

Bio: D.S. Maolalai lives in Ireland and has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times 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).

Patterns in the rocks

driving down kilkenny
as a favour to aodhain – a trip
to check for fossils
in the emptied dregs of coal.
this lizard
which lived in ireland
some million
something years ago –
and he’s hoping
to use its bones
to tell something
about the water. we park up

on the roadside
and stagger down
a path,
slick with the sogginess
of sulfur black mud.
there are twigs,
and over there
a river. sticks split beneath us
and cling with wet moss
like bones, holding
in broken arms. I look with him,
not knowing

what I'm looking for. "patterns in the rocks",
he says,
but I see those
anyway. after a while
I give up
and leave him searching. watch
as a bird
lands between us
and stretches
its wet neck. I eat a sandwich
and toss rocks
into the river. I confess;

I'm not checking
very carefully. it's possible
my boredom
sets science back
for years.

Citrus.

though also, I remember toronto
mainly for canadian
sunshine;
waking hungover
on my days off from work
and going to kensington
to pick up
the pineapple juice
from the lean-to stalls
run by hippies
in glass bottles. you drank it in
and tasted somehow
fresh as yesterday.
then you'd walk around
alive on a wednesday morning,
going to browse bookstores
and pick up nets
of oranges. there was something;
the sun
hot as lemons,
bright
as a new page. sometimes
my sometimes
girlfriend
would call me. sometimes I'd answer
and dance for her
in the sun
the way birds do
around peels of citrus
and other
colourful things.

Mass.

candles the colour
of bark-stripped tree-
branches. all sycamore,
willow
and birch.

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