A row of lilacs covered with a summer snow. Ten white butterflies.\ Donal Mahoney

The scruffy old man and his white poodle on a long red leash were neighborhood icons years ago down at the corner

If I knew I’d live forever I’d never send a poem out. No poem ever comes with ten fingers and ten toes so I’d keep revising, add

We do our best to avoid the Zika Virus. We smack mosquitoes and avoid tanned folks just back from two weeks in the tropics.

That my parents were Irish immigrants is probably the most significant factor in my writing life. The English expelled my father from Ireland around 1920 at age 18 or so for running gun...

Jimmy and Billy, two young men in kindergarten, went home from school every day just before noon. They lived in a small town in Nebraska, in the middle of farm country. It was the 1950s...

Summer evenings after the news at 6 p.m. the Widow Murphy comes out of her tiny bungalow and sits on her front porch swing

The hands on the atomic clock upstairs finally stopped spinning. As you know, my dear, the hands have been spinning for two weeks. This morning the clock stopped

Someone you respect does something that sticks in your craw like a fish bone dining in a crab shack. You try to cough it up

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

I have an old friend who was told some time ago he had six months to live. We live far apart now and he told me about this in an email shortly after the doctor told him. The six months ...

Red, yellow, brown work well together in a portrait of society. Add black, no problem. But if we remove the red,

The speaker is Phil Burns, owner of the brokerage firm that Owen Mitchell has had money invested with for years. Owen’s not rich and not poor. He just prefers the action of the stock ma...

When Bill was a lad his parents preached that Scripture was the truth. Decades later now Bill still believes that.

Ten years later he still mourns the death of his friend, Bill, such a smart man he could talk to