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.

They’ve been married 50 years and never a sorry day, Wally likes to say. Melba’s been a great wife but she’s very sick and doctors sa…

She was about the doing not about applause canning tomatoes in summer baking pies in fall quilting winter away

Elmo has spent 40 years cutting hair in a little shop in a country town along the Mississippi. Vegetables and meat

The problem doesn’t lie in not knowing. It lies in our not seeking him because when we die we meet him and we’re blinded by

You were a little older than three the day your father taught you how to pee, standing up. Your father trumpeted your triumph and your mother laughed in the kit…

In a life with many valleys and a few mountaintops Alvin has met many people he thought were normal and others he thought not.

A sense of shame is missing in the world today. If you find it, burp Donal Mahoney

We have a drop-off problem in Ame… We must decide which restroom one can use when nature beckons. So far, tumult reigns among the pe… If we declare both genders equal

Jim Daley and Joe McCarthy had something in common. They died at 80 going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Walt O’Brien, their protege, found this out when he called the home...

twenty-four houses on the same block everyone inside milling about one lost a job

It used to bother me to see odd people leapfrog parking meters and shout every day is Halloween until

On the road all week finally it’s Friday and he’s almost home so he calls his wife and says it will be

First, we place the neck on the bl… and put the basket underneath the head and then make sure the bl… is sharp enough before we ask the… one more time just to be polite:

I saw Al once a month for 30 years, maybe more, doing business together. He retired to hunt bear in Alaska, hook Tarpon