New Poetry by Donal Mahoney

Ringing in the Ears

Ringing in the ears
has no cure. 
It’s called tinnitus
and you can pronounce it 
the way it looks or the way 
your doctor says it.

Today I discovered how 
to turn the ringing off 
and that’s to take 
a phone call from your son 
who says your daughter 
died last night.

She won the first 
and second match but  
lost the last to cancer.
An hour later you realize
the ringing in your ears
has stopped but there’s 
no silence in its wake.

A train of memories 
chugs by and stops
and then chugs on again.  
You want the ringing 
in your ears back again.
You can live with that.


- Donal Mahoney 2017

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.