Donal Mahoney: Four Poems

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Love Is Another Thing


Sitting at the table
spinning the creamer
running her fingers through sugar
the kids spilled at supper, Sue

suddenly says, “Don,
love is another thing.”
Since love is another thing
I have to go rent a room,

leave behind eight years,
five kids, the echoes of me
raging at noon on the phone,
raging at night, the mist

of whose fallout ate her skin,
ate her bones, left her a kitten
crying high in an oak
let me free, let me free

Spider

Warm, wet, wrapped
in each other’s
arms, legs

still for a moment,
we rest

a spider spent,
lost in its web


Bending, Grabbing, Sorting

Chinese Laundry, Chicago

In a storefront laundry
on North Clark Street
brown draperies release
this quiet man

who has my shirts.
He smiles and bows--
how carefully
he wraps them.

Before the draperies
fall back, I see,
for a moment,
in a circle swirling

almost out of sight
three kerchiefed women,
glistening black,
bending, grabbing, sorting.

Those Poems, That Fire

I stood in the alley, still
in pajamas, somebody’s shoes,
another man’s coat, my eyes
on the bronc of the hoses.
Squawed in the blankets of neighbors,
my wife and three children sipped
chocolate, stood orange and still.
Of the hundred or more I had stored
in a drawer, I could remember,
comma for comma, no more than four,
none of them final,
all of them fetal.


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. A Pushcart nominee, he has had poems published by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Public Republic (Bulgaria), The Beanik (U.K), Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), The Osprey Journal (Scotland), Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications