Rick Mullin
is a painter and journalist who recently returned to writing poetry seriously after an extended period of concentrating on painting. He has poems appearing in summer or fall editions of The New Formalist, Contemporary Sonnet, Relief, and The Shit Creek Review. Rick lives in northern New Jersey.
—Back to Work Poetry Contents—
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The Terror of the Gods
“Your Science Can’t Remove the Terror of the Gods!
The bumper sticker on my filing cabinet
is there to bait my colleagues. What would be the odds
that any of the learned, yardstick-wielding sods
would come within a nano-inch of gettin’ it?
“Your Science Can’t Remove the Terror of the Gods!”
Ridiculous! A hoot! I’ll sometimes get the nod
from Sophie in accounting where the Internet
is used for more than counting. “Don’t you think it’s odd,”
she asks, “that top biologists are social clods
in work environments?” We keep repeatin’ it:
“Your Science Can’t Remove the Terror of the Gods!”
Our inside joke. It proves to be a lightning rod
for reprimands from Sue, the little martinet:
“We’re here to do good science, not to hear your odd—
ball sentiments.” The sentiment is a façade,
I reassure her smiling (Sue’s a minor threat).
“My science will improve today, so help me God!”—
Was that a little smile, Sue? What were the odds?
The Sandwich Man of Thornall Towers
The sandwich man’s a gangsta bon vivant,
all wiry with his crumpled paper hat.
He faces down a proletariat
of pasty-faced insurance men who want
the soggy tuna fish on rye. A layer
fat with mayonnaise is on the bread
like that. He hops and hollers—but instead
of calling “Next!” he fronts with “Step up, player!”
Their eyebrows tell it all. He’s tempting fate
as Lotto ladies start to bag their own,
preferring straight and boxed and neatly ranked
attendants at the sandwich bar. “Go home,”
he’s told on Monday when he rolls in late.
A flower blooms at Thornall—
it gets yanked.
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