Donal Mahoney

A Man and a Dog

A reporter asked Wilbur once

if there were any advantages

to being deaf and Wilbur

used sign language to say

not that he could think of

except you miss all the gossip

and that’s a good thing

if you live alone in a trailer camp

in a small town in Oklahoma

but it’s not a good thing

when a tornado comes through

and everyone else hears it

at midnight and gets out alive

but they forget to wake you

and you go up with the tornado 

along with a dog 

you can’t hear barking,

two small stars in the sky.

Donal Mahoney

As Wally Explained on the Locked Side Later

Another day at the zoo and 

Wally’s new job was to feed the apes. 

Old Stanley had fed the apes 

for 40 years and loved the job 

but told Wally he was retiring.

He was showing Wally the ropes when 

Wally got hit with a coconut 

lobbed by JuJu, the oldest ape, 

who liked Stanley but not Wally.

Stanley drove Wally to a dentist 

to check the damage to his teeth

but the dentist wanted to be paid 

in advance and Wally had

no money, only a bus pass 

and a bag lunch back in his locker.

He had never had a credit card. 

The dentist looked and sounded

like Mel Brooks and kept saying

he wanted his money before drilling. 

Wally’s father came to the office

and started writing a big check 

to the plumber who had come over

the previous week to fix the toilet.

Bleeding from the mouth Wally yelled,

“Dad, write the check to Mel Brooks, 

not the plumber," but his father said,

“Wally, shut up for a change" and he

kept writing the check to the plumber.

His father had been dead for 30 years

but he and Wally never got along well  

when his father was alive either.

Donal Mahoney

Answer Me This, America

Took the wife 

to a pancake house

the other day. 

National franchise

good food 

fine reputation.

Skipped the pancakes

had bacon, eggs,

hash browns, toast

and coffee.

Wife went fancy,

had an omelette.

Grabbed the check

because the busboy 

started clearing 

the table early.

A young dervish

new to the job

swirling his cloth

for minimum wage.

Bothered me 

to realize he'd work

three hours and a skosh

to pay for the same 

breakfast, more

if he left a tip.

Reminded me 

something’s wrong

with our great nation,

how we do business.

Have both ears open.

Hoping for an answer.

Donal Mahoney

Marimba in the Afternoon

Raul is a kind man

who plays marimba

in a salsa band at LA clubs

late into the night.

Some afternoons he plays 

at a nursing home in Cucamonga 

where he was born, grew up

and dashed home from school.

He’s paid with a taco,

maybe an enchilada,

a burrito now and then. 

On Sunday a fresh tamale

almost as good as his mother

used to make after being in  

the fields all day, long ago.

Old-timers in the day room 

bounce in their chairs, some 

on wheels, to Raul's music.

Long ago they were young 

and danced all night in

tiny clubs after being paid 

a few dollars a basket for 

picking grapes and plums 

under pounding sun.

Donal Mahoney

Fly Fishing

Many years ago Miriam’s parents 

took the kids for the weekend 

while she and Jack motored north 

to fish for trout in Montana 

at Miriam's request. 

Unsteady in her hip-waders 

but casting with abandon,

Miriam lobbed a snide remark 

and the hook snagged Jack's ear.

Jack told her not to worry, 

just a tiny bit of blood.

He'd put a band-aid on it 

back at the cabin

before he fried 

the rainbow trout still

wriggling in her creel.

Decades later Jack is back

at the cabin with his Phyllis,

a quiet woman who

has never cast for trout.  

He thinks she’ll do well.

Jack’s lost track of Miriam,

who sold the house long ago.

The kids are on their own.

He still scratches the ear 

where an itch recalls 

Miriam’s remark.

poems by , John Grey

John Grey

           

RITUAL

She calls her mother daily,

lips taut, teeth cracked open slightly,

her speech restricted

to only the most mundane of sounds.

Meanwhile, her mother pulls on

her daughter's words

like hands round rope

in a tug-of-war.

She wants the truth to come pouring out

along with the small talk,

break through these unnatural barricades.

But what's on the daughter's mind is too dense.

It can't be wrenched from her head

without taking half of her brain with it.

So her mother's futile entreaties

sweat and ache, grow callouses.

But she'll telephone again tomorrow

and then the day after that.

She has this urge to sa)' little

and hold back much.

Her mother feels a duty

to nibble at the ordinary

while imagining the worst.

It's a ritual that fills a need.

Mostly, it's the need of the ritual.

JOEY AND THE MOTORCYCLE

You were drawn to the chaos,

borne around bends,

through thin, dangerous channels

or brandished above me

over trees, rooftops,

your crazy grease-stained wheels

farther and farther below,

your dying like flying across the sky.

Watching the stars,

I want to separate you

from how I feel,

awed by your untamable,

unimaginable speeds

before ice played a role,

and slid you on like water

racing for the downspout -

the grave that knew

it was only a matter of time.

  

DOWNWARD DAN                                    

A drunken brawl

that he can hardly remember

and Dan had lost half his front teeth,

found himself sprawled on a sidewalk

in Dover, Delaware,

spitting blood and molar,

a burning throb in his jaw

as if someone had connected

with a flaming arrow.

A cop came by,

thumped Dan's wayward mouth

into a smile.

Dan reckoned it was tough,

from that angle

to tell what the joke was all about.

All he could think about

was his busted face.

how long it would be

before even the ugliest of women

found it to be kissable again.

He never did locate a dentist

who would work for nothing

or a fancy lady friend who could see past

his sunken cheeks.

But there was always liquor.

It never asked for

what he wasn't prepared to give.

His gums could testify to that.

There were more brawls,

more sidewalks,

more cops

but. at least,

he never lost another tooth.

One night, a homeless woman

offered him a place to sleep

under her bridge.

And she had a bottle of rotgut

which she shared.

That's how low Dan's sunk

since we hung with him back in the day.

He eats out of dumpsters.

He panhandles.

Whatever money he comes by

goes straight to the liquor store.

Soon, his insides will go the way of his canines

and without need of an intermediary

like a punch to the gut.

Dan's the one we all consult

if we want to know more about

a downward spiral.

And his run-ins with cops

are our dispirited lecture

on the true meaning of the law.

He's also a good example

of the tipping point

when alcohol becomes booze.

And he and his toothless bride

are a willing case

of what it takes sometimes

to be with somebody.

How many years is it

since we were all in high school together?

We knew Dan before he was an illustration.

poems by Doreski, William

Greenland and Antarctica

Field ice knuckles down to the sea

and fractures. Slabs coast away

to addle container ships lurching

to New Jersey, Hamburg, Rotterdam.

I lie awake worrying that bergs

as big as Manhattan will crush

these fragile ships and deprive us

of necessities fresh from China.

Aren’t you worried, too? Your back,

as you sleep your crescent of sleep,

is a map on which I can project

new seas, new continents no one

even mildly sane has explored.

Maybe you’re dreaming of field ice

shuddering as thick rivers melt it,

climate change sickening the air

with the cries of failing species.

Maybe you’re dreaming of hiking

those ice-fields with me, crampons

groaning with purchase, ice axe

poised to slaughter pale creatures

that loom in the chilly fog. I press

against you, hoping that layer

upon layer of flesh will protect

the planet from its ugly secrets.

You stir a little but snooze away

my local effects. Antarctica

and Greenland seem so far away,

their rugose coastlines beaming

with winter sun or brooding

with winter dark. Which winter

are we? Early traffic sizzles

as the daily commute begins.

No one commutes to Greenland

or Antarctica, but the ice fields,

caught between competing eons,

simper like freshly printed paper

on which the latest scripture scrawls.

Red and White Stripes

Framed in the red and white stripes

of your six pillows your face

goes adrift, warping into places

I can’t enter without mourning

the forty years we discarded

like a cargo of empty oil drums.

The city grumbles to itself

with most of its passions muted

by the buzz of construction sites

and the criminal expressions

of cops in fresh new uniforms.

We should visit the museum

with its Dutch masters blazing

and Goya too angry to paint

but painting anyway, on and on

into black and gray infinities.

We should lunch like typical

elderly couples, late blooming

over delicate little sandwiches

and glasses of oily white wine.

In a few minutes the patter

of your bare feet on the hardwood

will present angles of vision

no one since Adam has enjoyed.

The snore of traffic will become

gossip of epic proportions,

and the stoplights will pause

on yellow for hours at a time.

The cops will almost learn to smile,

creasing their aggressive trousers.

Then you’ll fade into distance

rendered geological by habits

we hope to acquire. And then

I’ll know why the red and white

stripes of your pillows say nothing

of ordinary blood and flesh.

Lana Bella poems:

Lana Bella

1) IN THE BREW OF LEISURE

from the outside,

the house was painted rose salmon 

with blue shutters,

in what silver stains lived another life,

I stared at my shadow on the wall,

its gaze traveled where hued runnel bled into 

the yolk-sun overhead,

then earthward

to a pair of feet standing in the brew of leisure,

what wonder drug was this

when I let idleness become a river of two suns, 

one was the leaving moon drawn closed and dark,

the other, the wakeful one,

seared imprints where my shadow 

gave chase into breath's filter, 

conspicuously near,

just once beneath this heat's imprint,

I would like to be 

on the side of a place where leisure went to hide, 

and not be felt or seen--

2) AN IMPOSSIBLE WOUND

an autumn pine cone laden of sap drove

down my prayer balloon, then inside my 

fingers it stretched heavy like a wrecking

ball yawn, her mouth, red and upturned, 

snapped my impossible wound in two as 

a forked bone,

I held within the songs she sang to me, 

remembering an ocean parting between 

us now--her sand-paper words that still 

rapped my knuckles into bend hastened 

like a storm tearing through my flesh, 

I stood on a tale which went untold, dim 

in the autumn breeze that traveled the 

narrow turns of her cinched chiffon robe,

it was a brief indulgence, I knew, for the

end came ever so keen and fine, 

her gaze rose over miles of shifting planes, 

and upon the fickle skin of these nimbus, 

my love restraint laid down in mourning, 

orphaned like a shrapnel dispersing along 

the unforgiving soil,

I became a stone lay unobstructive, stoic

to her leaving over then round the carved 

landscape, even when everything that grew 

around me pinged of twin emotions: her 

baptismal stamp and my elegant sorrow,

so wherever or however long I will live, I will

tuck myself carefully away in a place only

known to me, without her--

3) WHEN HE IS MOST LOST

an old man wraps himself in familiar threads 

of the garden's atmosphere,

with his bad hips and worse eyesight,

he folds in two as if a bent dollar bill, 

it is early spring,

sunlight and birds make their descent

below the window sills,

where he is knuckled deep in dirt,

a handful of clouds and blue daffodil

plunk down besides his burnt-brown skin,

he breathes them in,

leaving shadows like an angel's nimbus,

looking about the garden,

he wonders how little things like bird seeds

and fertilizer

could release the pulses of emotion,

when he is most lost.

4) CATCH PHRASE

if I could reach out, 

and take hold of

the first word you spoke as it was then,

because at some point 

I became just an empty catchphrase

that traced your skid-marks

with my eyes--

I let your ghost settled the weight 

on my body,

a thin stale leash of smoke

tethered me to the earth

as I dug with my hands through 

the russet dirt,

for your messages 

from the grave--

5) DEAR SUKI: LETTER J FOR JEANS

Dear Suki: Los Angeles, December 2nd, somehow, just now, 

I find a memory of you in that old pair of blue jeans, the one 

that tears awfully at the knees and fades from front to end. 

My melancholia, this, when there is nothing to lean back to 

unless I am holding on to some visible threads with your 

invisible glue, how steady the ligaments, how imperishable 

the starch. This may seem silly but it is not my intention to 

make you sad, at any rate, I think I will don your blue jeans 

over my wool leggings, to add an extra layer to ward off this

December cold. So that my stirring moves just so against the 

memory of your body.