Jeanne Mahon was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio. She currently lives in Mercer, Pennsylvania, but routinely crosses the state line to meet with Fallen City Writers. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals, including: The Hiram Poetry Review, Cutbank, The Cimarron Review and West Branch. In 1984, she was the recipient of an individual grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Her first book of poetry, The Wolf in the Wood, was published in 1996 by Pangborn Books, Ltd. She is poetry editor of Shenango River Books, and most recently worked on Neno Perrotta's Not One Thing About Science which she recommends as one fascinating read. She enjoys giving readings of her work and is available to local book clubs, libraries, and study groups, whatever.
of Dresden
In
America, in my mind, again
it is close to the end of the war.
My mother stands in the kitchen making swans,
the room drenched with the smell of butter.
She beats flour into steaming water
and melted butter, stirs this over the flame,
everything clumps in a golden ball.
She whisks in one egg at a time,
then drops mounds of this mixture
onto the cookie sheet, pipes the rest
through a silver tube
shaped like a penis, an S
for the swan's head, a comma
for its tail. In the oven
the mounds bake and puff up.
When these cool, she slits their tops off,
halves them for wings, fills the swans' bodies
with whipped cream. Golden swans float
on the blue tray. I serve them
to the ladies who come to play cards.
They are beautiful, these women
without men in time of war.
I love their summer dresses
and hairdos that roll back so their faces
seem like hearts. They warn me
not to listen to The Shadow on the radio, to do
nothing to rain nightmares down.
Now, years later, I recall these generous,
foolish ladies who conspired to keep my childhood
airy, light, sheltered from the dark heart.
How could The Shadow compare
to the world which surrounded me,
the destruction of the swans
of Dresden, or the gorilla who escaped
the firestorm at the Dresden Zoo,
lumbered to the outskirts and there, bent
over the smoking rubble, puzzled as he looked
into the eyes of a man, slowly returning
to consciousness? Or the flamingo who rolled
its burning wings in snow, then froze overnight?
© 2004 Jeanne Mahon
84 Yankee Ridge Road
Mercer, PA 16137
jeannemahon@hotmail.com
© 2004 Jeanne Mahon