Harvesting Pumpkins


From small towns in Iowa,
Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska,
from villages in the Dakotas,
there stream to Chicago
lithe girls looking for boys
who will look at them
but who find instead the men

who will wine them through summer
and wait until fall to thresh in the fields
summer will ripen,
who will wait till a pumpkin
rolls off a vine.
This is the courtship village girls
dream of and hope for.

Come fall, these men fill silos
of girls from Elkhart and Davenport,
Ely and other small places,
girls who in spring come to Chicago
looking for boys who will look at them,
who find instead
the reapers, the men.



Mop Woman


Near dwarf this woman.
Foreign born. Minsk,
perhaps. Nose

a fist. Hair
a whisk broom
only black. Her back

an Orthodox cupola,
her arms braids of gym rope
lowered to the floor.

Orangutans could climb
those ropes, hand
over hand, no rose

no purple
doughnuts
on their hinds.

Near dwarf this woman.
Foreign born. Minsk,
perhaps.

Her hands, all gristle,
hang an inch, no more,
above her shining floor.


Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine and The Road Apple Review and other publications.