Rick Mullin has travelled throughout Europe and the US as a business journalist covering the pharmaceutical and chemical industries for the American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News. He has made the occasional foray on his own as well. His forthcoming collection, Stignatz and the User of Vicenza, will be published by Dos Madres Press, which has also published his collections Coelacanth and Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, as well as his long poem, Soutine, on the life of the painter Chaim Soutine.
All work
into the deep haze of the sleep one lacks, / the lag, the heavy sense of moving out / of time. And back. And forth across the grachts //
What is to the waking eye more beautiful /
than coming into Lackawanna Station /
in the first red ochre day of spring, …
The zipper on my laptop bag went bust /
at John Wayne Airport in the morning rush. /
I was a nightmare at security …
One springtime morning in Cologne, /
on business, traveling alone /
and walking at an early hour, /
I came on Konrad Adenauer. …
More from The Journal
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By Kelly Hill
Trying to wrap my mind around living on a tropical island for thirteen years and never once seeing the ocean, I stumbled through my Indonesian vocabulary to say, It’s good. It’s big.
- Travel Notes
By Sandra Larson
A dinosaur dangles over my grandson at the Field Museum near a pink thumb that pops into the prom picture of my granddaughter dressed in strapless red leaving her house in Medina …
- Travel Notes
By Megan Hallinan
The bill in question is actually a 2,000 West African franc note, and it’s the equivalent of about four U.S. dollars. A helpful sum, really, but as I clutch the weathered crinkle in my sweaty palm, its value feels as dirty as the grime that is undoubtedly being transferred to my fingers.
- Poetry
to Egg and Berry brewery, to the pack / of Czechy words I made but didn’t work / in this pink town. I’d readily go back / to your best spots, the unfired gun, that perk //
- Poetry
By Jason Warren
And if the neap tides of my beauty / sadden him, I cannot help it: / I hang high, the waxy night light …
- Poetry
By Anastasia Vassos
Three thousand ancestors ask how I straddle / the sea, a foot on either shore. //
Read more Poetry or Postcard Prose
