Bristol Student Housing
alone on the floor
in the Bristol Student
Housing rooms.
a bus-ride from London –
a weekend to visit a friend
who quickly got drunk
in ecstatic reunion,
left the bar at 11
forgetting I'd come.
and I was drunk too:
nowhere to go
that I knew of.
I didn't know anyone
except him in Bristol.
didn’t know where
he lived. and this
was post bar-close and 2
or so am. first tried a hotel –
they didn't take
drunks. met some
students instead;
let me sleep on their floor
in a hallway. strange decision
on their part, but I guess
that I didn't
look dangerous.
skinny, 23, soft
of face and an old
leather jacket. I woke up
in the morning before them.
mouth like a burned
cigarette. I'd been given
a sheet and been told
I could sleep
on the carpet. took a call
from my friend – he'd woke
and remembered
he'd lost me.
stole an apple
from the kitchen
for breakfast and let
myself out.
Confetti
this was some festival
celebration in the city. we all
about 18, as drunk as an elephant
each, on the fulcrum of a public bench
down in drumcondra, near a train
station plated with piss. might have been
a football match or something
like st patricks day. dublin has
a lot of days like that. we were not
at the bars – just sat in the sunlight
doing beer runs around every roughly
90 minutes. we were maybe under
18 after all, or maybe the mood
had taken us to watch people
passing – and these pigeons
on the street around a pizza. anyway – this
is the point then of the poem:
I was just coming back with fallon
and a can slab from the corner
and this guy comes round the corner
just behind us with a mazda.
pauses at the flock of them –
they don't move – edges
onward. bonnet cracks the back
of one head before they go. it's funny – I think
that it's the only time I've seen it happen.
you'd think you would occasionally.
they’re dead everywhere, but you never
see them die. anyway: it popped
like a stuffed bag of confetti. feathers everywhere.
they're really held together. anyway:
we all yell what the hell then like a chorus.
the guy laughing, us laughing kind of angry
because what can you do and it's not illegal
and not like he was going to wait for them.
but it was kind of unpleasant then
sitting with those feathers and a dead
bird in a pile like a dirty duvet.
went somewhere else. I blacked out.
think I texted molly and she came and picked me up.
Bare Chestnut
sun splitting sharply
through bare
chestnut branches,
like a bottle
to splinters
on grey kitchen
tile. autumn
ends suddenly
and flakes
over winter –
the bodies
of foliage
wet mildew
and mulch. meat
dropped to corners
like a wrecked
rotten chicken; stalks
on the pavement,
discarded wing
bones.
DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as "a cosmopolitan poet" and another as "prolific, bordering on incontinent". His work has been nominated eleven 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)