Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Commonweal, Guwahatian Magazine (India), The Galway Review (Ireland), Public Republic (Bulgaria), The Osprey Review (Wales), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey) and other magazines. Some of his work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs (Photo: Carol Bales) THE HONEY ROOM by Donal Mahoney Brother Al, in his hood, is out in his field making love to his bees. From my room I can see him move through his hives the way people should move among people. The bees give him gold and the gold turns orange in the jars that he sells in a room near the door of the abbey. The Honey Room, everyone calls it. Besides Brother Al, only I go into that room full of honey. I go in there and bend and look through the jars on the shelves and the sills till there in the orange I see Sue standing straight in a field of her own with a smile for our garland of children. IN BREAK FORMATION by 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 slower. But after supper, when I hear her in the kitchen hum again, hum higher, higher, till my ears are numb, I remember how it was the last time: how she hummed to Aramaic peaks, flung supper plates across the kitchen till I brought her by the shoulders humming to the chair. I remember how the final days her eyelids, operating on their own, rose and fell, how she strolled among the children, winding tractors, hugging dolls, how finally I phoned and had them come again, how I walked behind them as they took her by the shoulders, house dress in the breeze, slowly down the walk and to the curbing, how I watched them bend her in the back seat of the squad again, how I watched them pull away and heard again the parliament of neighbors talking.
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