DS Maolalai recently returned to Ireland after four years away, now spending his days working maintenance dispatch for a bank and his nights looking out the window and wishing he had a view. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Women from one perspective

at 18
I was
god knows what—
a fool
and certain,
full of feeling
and the knowledge
that women
from my perspective
were this great
bodied
and
unknowable thing;
greek statues
in gardens eating grapes
who got all their mystique
from men
wanting them,
and man
did I want them,
even though I wouldn’t have known
what to do
if I had one.
but they moved gracefully
and laughed
like slow glass breaking
and so much more roundly than I did.
and they never dropped their phones
or ate spaghetti badly
or said something that they thought about
later
like fools in bed—
sometimes I’d manage to trick one
to think that all my fumblings
were a palm for something more special
and artistic
from tv
but that never lasted very long
and now
I feel the same
but realise they do too—
we are all those fish from the early periods
crawling for landfall,
struggling in mud,
trying out air
and being eaten by birds,
gasping forward,
to fuck
and grow legs.