Donal Mahoney Poems

Jim Clowes had a red '53 Ford that looked terrible. The paint on the car was almost all gone, although there were still patches of paint mixed with patches of rust. The clunker was an unsightly quilt in their small town surrounded by family farms. Even in the Sixties, few people in this rural area had ever seen a car as rough as this one.

Jim had a small pension and couldn't afford a better car. He and his wife Emma would sit on the porch day after day in the summer talking about anything. Emma would use the hand fan that had Eagan Funeral Home on it to keep the flies away and to stir whatever breeze there was during the late summer.
...

It wasn't long after her mother died my wife asked if her father could live with us. We had an empty apartment upstairs. Dad wouldn't be much trouble, she said. He was old now and had difficulty getting around. We put a stair lift in so he could ride up to his apartment. Otherwise he walked pretty well with a cane.

Dad would come down for dinner, and we'd put our pit bull—a not too friendly pit bull—in the basement. Dad would eat, chat a bit and then ride his stair lift back upstairs. But when the chair developed a mechanical problem, Dad was stuck upstairs.
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Annie has a nice washing machine now
but she remembers the one her
mother had with the wringer,
the old-fashioned kind.
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It's not good when two disturbed people
with little in common disagree by email
on something important.
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He wants to be fair
to both sides because
there's an election
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Better take his wife to lunch
after what he said yesterday.
A slip of the tongue.
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If love's real, not
the puppy kind, it's
not just a feeling
but an act of the will
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If you've seen
a cockatoo up close
in a cage or at a zoo
you may have noticed how
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