Rick Mullin
is a journalist and painter whose poetry has appeared in several print and online journals including The Lyric, The New Formalist, Contemporary Sonnet, and Light Quarterly.
His chapbook Aquinas Flinched was published this year by Modern Metrics.
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Montclair Father, 46
According to the Ledger, neighbors saw
the father’s flash-lit face just hanging there
for hours in the attic window, raw,
collapsed and swollen, as the three Montclair
detectives ambled in and out. It said
he drowned his daughters, 5 and 6, and hanged
himself on an electric cord. The dead
man set in mortal stone, the front door banged.
I put the paper down and fed my girls.
And later, when the youngest was asleep,
I walked outside to breathe the summer night
and see if stars appeared above the sweep
of headlights on the highway that unfurls
into these pools of flat electric light.
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