America had a choice November 8 between a devil they know and a devil they don’t. They chose

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

At a school reunion festive and grand a young teacher makes a point with a retired teacher

It tears the stomach out of Roy to see old folks shopping at an all-night grocery store ancient couples, on canes and walkers

In two more hours I’ll have to sh… shave and coffee-prop my lids and otherwise prepare for day. It’… and now the barkeep, Griggs, is rushing me, the first

Snow on Christmas Day. As I walk out with bird seed birds cry Santa’s here. Donal Mahoney

Someone you respect does something that sticks in your craw like a fish bone dining in a crab shack. You try to cough it up

After Yeats and Heaney, you wonder when the new one will come galloping out of Dublin or perhaps from yet another farm

When I was eight I jumped off a roof as if I had a parachute and broke a leg. He was there when I landed,

On their honeymoon he asked her not to sit down. Might bruise the peaches. Donal Mahoney

From my stool in the diner I watc… the old woman with elm tree arms command the big booth in back and roar for a menu, take a half hour to read it

He asked and so I told him. The “cancer” poems stem from cancer in the family. Daughter’s terminal. Son’s a five-year survivor.

We’re all salmon swimming upstream until the job’s done. Some of us know it and some of us don’t.

Like the poor the sparrows we will always have with us, my neighbor lady tells me as she feeds the birds

I lived in the attic back then, and late those evenings I had to s… and couldn’t afford to go drinking I’d run down to the deli and buy bagels and smoked lox.