10/21/2016 0 Comments Three Poems by Donal MahoneyUnintelligent Design An hour a day, sometimes more, I chipped away with mallet and chisel on a block of marble I found in Carrara and shipped to New York on the deck of a trawler. I offered the marble to a famous sculptor who told me he works in granite only so I grabbed his beret and one of his smocks and said I'd sculpt the block myself with whittling skills picked up as a kid from a drunken uncle named Whittling Sid. Several weeks later, to my surprise, I finished the bust of a chimpanzee simply by wielding mallet and chisel the way I wield pencil and eraser when hewing a poem. Working with marble or working with words, a sculptor or poet proves less is more by chipping away until something emerges upright and walking with a soul of its own. An Old Poet Shares a Secret The editor of the school paper came at the appointed hour and found the old poet in his backyard alert in a lawn chair with a butterfly net on his lap. She opened her iPad, conducted her interview and asked him at the end where poems come from. The old poet said he didn’t know. That’s why he has his butterfly net. If a poem floats by he uses his net to lift if carefully out of the air, take it in the house and pin it to the wall with his name under it. When his wall’s covered with poems he calls his publisher who comes and takes the poems away. In six months the old poet says he has another book on Amazon. Just Like Yesterday Fred and Martha have always voted the same way since their marriage long ago but not this time and Fred wondered why Martha was voting the other way until the other night when they listened to the news and heard women as old as Martha say they had been molested as a child. During the commercial Martha told Fred she too had been molested and she remembers it just like yesterday. She had never told Fred before. He did his best to look stoic but felt guilty for every man. Martha explained what happened that day in the back seat of the Buick next to her father’s friend from work when they were all going to the carnival to ride the tilt-a-whirl and her father didn’t see what happened in the rear-view mirror. Martha didn’t tell her father. She was 12, after all, going to the carnival to ride the tilt-a-whirl on her birthday like her father promised. She didn’t want to ruin everybody's day. Bio: Donal Mahoney, a product of Chicago, lives in exile now in St. Louis, Missouri. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune and Commonweal. Some of his online work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs=
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