Donal Mahoney Poems

Anything can set him off.
Been that way for 40 years
since he came back from Nam.
...

Jesus, can we talk? Some folks say you're coming back any day now but many of them have been saying that for years. They say it could happen tomorrow, or maybe next week, and they've already put their affairs in order. They believe they will be swept up and taken into heaven, leaving many others on the ground, just standing there, slack-jawed and staring at all the backsides rising in the air.

I'd like to among those rising but my Baptist barber says he doesn't think papists will be issued passports for this trip. I've been his customer for 30 years so he plans to take a rope along and drop it down to me. If I grab hold and can hang on, he says I'm welcome to come along if Jesus doesn't cut me loose. I may be a papist, he says, but he knows from all our haircut debates over the years that I believe in Jesus and the bible as the inerrant Word of God. He even tells his Baptist and Four Square Gospel customers I'm okay, theologically speaking.
...

Hummingbirds dance
iridescence afire
...

Nothing is anywhere anymore,
Dad shouts over the phone.
His reveille again at 4 a.m.
Will I come over and find it?
...

When he walks behind her
so many years his wife

up the staircase laughing
...

The next morning the lady says
take me out for breakfast
someplace I have never been
someplace I will never see again
...

white hips a soft fist
for the wrist of your waist
black hair in a spill
...

Maury's wife frets
about growing old
withering up
...

If I were a possum
with a tail that long
I too would hang
from a tree limb
...

Take it from me
sitting on the edge of this star
in the universe with
meteors zipping around me.
...