To Make a Living
{An Umbrella Special Feature}


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—

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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