Decades ago a small college out in the boondocks put Ambrose, a freshman, on a Greyhound Bus to attend a student convention in New York.

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

Perhaps there should be a hard rock band called myasthenia gravis. A rare disease for which there is no cure, MG doesn’t kill anyone right away but unmanaged it’s hard to live with. In ...

Cardinals bicker and knock seed from the feeder. Doves parade below. Donal Mahoney

Tattoos were anathema in ‘52 on any man who got one after an all-night drunk or to impress a girlfriend. But not a word was spoken to

A neighbor lady I hadn’t seen in a year I heard was bedridden. Her former husband dropped by, asked if I’d to take in her trash… when I brought in my own.

This is Granny in the Ozarks call… Please come down before spring goes away for summer. The geese are coming through and landing on the pond

Beneath the bowling-alley bar marquee the rain tonight hammers off the concrete.

There are poems everywhere but you have to find them, a teacher told my class long ago. I was a kid sitting at a desk, cowlicks sprouting from my scalp,

For years leprechauns lived under Pop’s fedora. They danced jigs on his head when he wore it and hid in his ears

Evil without we worry about but not so much evil within, parent to evil without. Evil within, once called sin,

You drive down the same country road every day at dawn and see through plumes of dust

Tornadoes in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, t… churned every hour Dad was home. He never worked and with good reason.

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