Donal Mahoney

The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they’re
...

As I've told my wife too many times,
the meaning of any poem hides
in the marriage of cadence and sound.
...

Brother Al, in his hood,
is out in his field
making love to his bees.
From my room I can see him
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Five kids, eight years.
And then one day my wife
shouts to me on the tractor
roaring in the field:
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The New Morse Hotel
Chicago, circa 1970

What if after Browne has gone
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For years I've fed this feral cat at 4 a.m.,
a crouching mound of fur, Satanic black, with yellow eyes
that never blink. I call him 'Doubting Thomas.'
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In 1948 Booger McNulty's coal yard stirred
constant gossip among the citizens who lived
in little bungalows on narrow blocks
in my far corner of Chicago.
...

We christened Megan
Catholic today
just as we had,
years ago, Sean and Nora.
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Perhaps it's true
perhaps it's not

we'll never know
if it's the reason
...

Beulah needs another man who'll take
the garbage out at dawn and not
bring it back again at midnight, something
Jasper's done many nights for years.
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Zenobia Jackson told Officer Murphy
that her husband, Rufus,73 years old,
was 'a wonderful man when he was awake'
but he had been jerking 'something terrible'
...

If one could store them
in the attic without stir
and turn to other things,
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Where will the lovely lady go
on her diurnal walk?
One child in 30 years she bore,
now they do not talk.
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They seem to be everywhere now,
women who walk like men.
With hair cropped in a paint brush,
bullets for eyes and knives for noses,
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Riding home on the train, Paddy's aware
that after supper, cigarettes, TV and beer
a romp on the wife will cloak
...

I told my wife the other night
when she came back to bed
my feet were cold so now's
the time for me to tell her
...

In this college town
three girls of Spring are fresh bread
brown before the noon of May.
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The weekday Mass at 6 a.m.
brings old folks out
from bungalows
around the church.
...

I've found no new woman,
as you'd like to surmise.
But the next one
who braids
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I can no more justify these poems
than can the pyromaniac
his conflagrations. We both
stand back, the pyromaniac
...