Being poor on our patch of land was better than being poor all the years I’ve lived in the ci… We had a couple of cows, a rooster and seven hens.

Young hummingbird swirls and darts to the red feeder. Black cat waits below. Donal Mahoney

He slaughters his hamburger steak with a fork and a butter knife, massacres ringlets of onions again and again thumps catsup all over

A row of lilacs covered with a summer snow. Ten white butterflies. Donal Mahoney

Before dawn Bill stoops under crimson leaves of the low-hanging Japanese Maple

Midnight in San Francisco. Yoshiko is 93 and she can’t sleep so she sits in her recliner and nibbles on a rice cake,

It’s your anniversary so you’re thinking steak but your wife wants ramen so you go to a nice place and order the fancy ramen

Dreams I can’t remember cause a conflagration fire hoses can’t put out. Dreams I can recall arrive in technicolor.

I was very small the day they bombed Pearl Harbor but I remember my mother dashing around the kitchen saying nothing to me

We’re upset when vandals desecrate a cemetery and disrespect the dead not so much when doctors vandalize the womb

His cardiologist says Fred’s doing well for a man of 80. It won’t be his heart that kills him.

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

Millie on crutches in the day room tells Fred on his walker to find him.

What we are not who we are matters to the world. Who we are not what we are