Two poems by Two Poets

Quincy, Illinois: 1962

long before Barack Obama

Those days he toiled in Quincy,

two weeks, no more,

he saw no blacks, except for

two young girls busing dishes.

Daisy badges on their uniforms

announced their names,

their years of service.

He remembers how

through all his meals

he wanted to shout:

Where do you live?

What do you do for recreation?

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO.. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Public Republic (Bulgaria), Gloom Cupboard (U.K.), Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Poetry Super Highway, Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications.

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a.

To the Condors at Pittsburgh’s National Aviary

Would that the Andes fell

beneath you spanning

in a panoramic of the epic film;

your offspring cracking through

the shell blue casing,

exposed in blaring wilderness

of America unfettered.

b.

Lilac Cadillac

in my youth is the way to begin

like a symphony tuning in a dime store

or boutique

on my way East from Downtown

along the Friendship-Garfield dotted line,

I notice a pair of dungarees arched from

below a seventeen-foot Cadillac,

the kind that are content to be just

where they are and no where else.

A jettison of grease and spit

mark the faded and pockmarked

blacktop. I can see a boy with

basketball pouting in a stance impatient.

His friend, perhaps, comes whistling around

the corner.

There are promises quickly made in the formless

afternoon and man becomes a boy

under a sun that covers both he and the Cadillac

once white now lilac.

Israel Vásquez was home schooled in Michigan. He has some brothers and one sister and one wife and one cat. He got turned around in the Mid-West, thinking he was heading to Portland but somehow ended up in Pittsburgh. And, he loves it all. www.flickr.com/ispeva