Two Poems by Rick Mullin

Gravity

My mother, made inert by weight and knee,
spends waking hours watching her TV.
The laptop she obtained on QVC
lies dark and out of reach, predictably.
We call, but all her calls are transferred straight
to voicemail. She doesn’t read. She stays up late.
The only stimulant she has to compensate
for everything she’s blocked is solid state
illumination (decorative notions,
side effect disclaimers, jewelry promotions…)
Her dreams must bear a weight of lost emotions.
She sleeps. And when she wakes she thinks of oceans.
She lies in bed and tries to name them all.
But some are seas, perhaps. She can’t recall.
She thinks about the tides that rise and fall.
She’d like a globe, she tells me. Something small.

Aubade

Now the winds of April exhume a morning
shorn of mist. Unreasoning breaks the daylight.
Echoed strains of Horowitz Plays Scriabin
cool in the ashes.

I’m awake. The coffee decants in Pyrex.
Clouds break down as newspapers skid the driveways
out along the boulevard of contrition.
God isn’t watching,

you’re asleep. The radio, jammed on zero,
still complains how one is a lonely number.
I’m OK. In deep with the mug’s imbalance.
Nothing is final.

Rick Mullin is a journalist and painter living in Northern New Jersey. His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, Epiphany, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. His latest collection, The Basilisk, was published in 2021 by Dos Madres Press. Other books include Soutine (Dos Madres, 2012) and Huncke (second edition, Exot Books, 2021).