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.
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