Short Paring Knife Poems

Short-Pants Potentate


Inferno of a summer day
Mother’s dozing

Tommy, tiny, three,
paring knife in hand

tiptoes out, flops
short-pants potentate

upon the sidewalk sunny,
operates on ants


Donal Mahoney...

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This shade is damp with the net of sun
finely sliced with the paring knife of trees.

We softly move among old bones, places
where ancient lovers have lain, grinding
one another into thin blue dust, drinking
from a chalice of silvered hands held
one to the other safe in mid-afternoon light
among gnats and May apples arching achingly
toward the slow, soft, satin churnings of death....

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