Donal Mahoney Poems

My mother always said my father
was a little odd and she lived with him
all those years and should have known.
When we were small my sister and I
...

Raul is a kind man
who plays marimba
in a salsa band at LA clubs
late into the night.
...

The beauty of gray
I never noticed until
the other day I saw
...

Fifty years ago
Jane got on a plane
and flew away
without saying good-bye.
...

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
...

No more nudes in Playboy
according to the anchor
on the Nightly News.
...

No, Freddie can't say he mourned when his father died and his father's third wife found Freddie's number and gave him a call to give him the news. His father had been responsible, worked hard, saved his money, put Freddie and his brothers through college but when his mother died and all the boys had grown up and left home, his father disappeared. No forwarding address. After awhile Freddie didn't think that much about him. So he was surprised when this widow he didn't know called and told him his father had been hit by a truck that ran up on a sidewalk and flattened him. Declared dead at the hospital.

Freddie didn't mourn his mother either when she had died although he had spent two years taking her to the best doctors hoping one of them would save her from cancer, not realizing that back in those years there was nothing doctors could do for a cancer so severe and caught so late, certainly not the big-time surgeon who said that he could. He was number one at a teaching hospital and wanted to fatten his mother up so he could operate on her again so all the residents and interns could watch and learn from him as he attempted to do the impossible.
...

It’s all so simple now,
yet it took 30 years
to begin to understand.
It’s as though someone
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Climbing up the dirt hill out
behind the house they’re putting up
in Krupka’s lot, Tom found two pellets
...

Infinite feints
for a lane
to go driving.
...