 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) 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. A Great Time for a Climb That’s a very big tree and a boy scout could climb it with all the right gear. But it’s a condominium, too. You would disturb families. Blue Jays don’t feature interruptions when they have young in the nest. They put up with squirrels scampering across the branches. Robins have young too but they have no interest in seeds or nuts and no one else likes worms. Sparrows chatter away and raise a ruckus since they have young also. Why not wait until fall when the young leave the tree. Fall's a great time for a climb. Remembering a War We Tend to Forget I will never forget him but I can’t remember his name it’s been so long ago. Maybe I never knew it. But I think of him on days America celebrates its veterans-- Memorial Day, July 4th, Veterans Day, D-Day. The wars are all remembered but not so much this one. He was Billy's big brother and more than 60 years ago Billy and the rest of us were in 8th grade watching him climb a ladder and hammer a hoop on the roof of a garage so we could play ball while he went to Korea. I saw him again when he came back from Korea. He was walking in circles in the family’s backyard smoking Pall Malls, one after another, talking to no one we could see. We were practicing at the hoop he nailed up before he went to Korea. We were seniors in high school then and had to be ready. We practiced all summer for the season ahead. 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. An Old Friend in a Box I found an old friend in a cardboard box in the basement where I left him forty years ago. His body was intact but he never had a heart which is why I left him with drafts of other poems published long ago on paper in little magazines decades before computers appeared. The poems were born on a Royal typewriter with carbon paper serving as midwife. He was the only one I didn't sent out but didn’t have the heart to abort. I took him upstairs to see if my skills as a surgeon had developed. Maybe I could give him a heart on my iMac. So far so good. He’s not perfect but he’s wriggling. If he doesn’t reject his new heart I’ll let you know how he turns out.
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