DS Maolalai March 2018

March 2018

inside we were drinking. outside, snow broke its skull on the rooftops and steamed the windows like piss from a drunk. clothes stuck tightly; everyone entering sweaty as a wet cat. but still, we were drinking. sat at a table which clicked on our knees and argued about anything to keep the cold out. enjoying ourselves; pointing for punctuation and guzzling beer which smelled of wet leather. in dublin the pubs are wonderful. rain no reason to slow anyone down. and blizzards even less so—just a day off work. coats all over, and the stink of drying laundry. cold making entry at every open door. and nobody, for once trying to fuck anyone else; the weather too perfect for drinking, political discussion and long indoor conversations; getting someone home more trouble than it's worth.

DS Maolalai

DS Maolalai has released two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden and Sad Havoc Among the Birds.

How to Change a Diaper

First, make sure you have one. Often you don’t and you hear your grandson grunting under a table he thinks is a cave in a men’s clothing store where his Grandpa contemplates buying an elegant suit to replace the elegant suit he hasn’t worn in twenty years. If you’d had a diaper you could have taken your darling past the Pierre Cardin’s to the fancy bathroom you never got to see. You could have chased that cherub around the marble sinks hopefully with his fulsome diaper still on and not with it half off. Oh, no, not that in the swanky dimly lit ladies room you never visited because of your cavalier attitude about the diaper. Instead, you had to drift into Grandpa’s dreams about the suit he’d never wear— its singular cut, its silk-like feel— to encourage him, instead, to pick up his odiferous grandson and move casually but swiftly to the door, now being precipitously opened by the bowing, no longer hopeful, suited salesman. But, every ill wind blows some good because you did get to watch Grandpa ask— as the fragrant reality caused him to turn his beautiful dream-wrenched face toward you— in a puzzlement akin to that of a sleeper dazed into sunlight: “Where the hell’s the diaper?”

Mary Ann Larkin

Mary Ann Larkin is retired from Howard University and lives in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies. Her full-length book is entitled That Deep and Steady Hum.