O:JA&L Poetry: All forms & styles
Frederick Pollack
Midcentury Modern
The knotty metaphysics of “getting even” –
by what standard?
The even more obscure psychology
of “making them sorry” –
for what? Being caught?
I’ll never meet myself …
he’s in school uptown, smart, bullied, miserable.
Still I wish he knew that triumph will be his.
New guests arriving, like all things seen
(the genteel street, the shade-plants in her foyer)
through the glass bricks this hostess has installed
are numinously distorted.
I hold forth, ebullient, mobile or
enthroned in an Eames chair.
I know enough to let the others
rouse themselves to wit,
which I then invert, augment,
and knock out of the park.
They don’t notice I drink less –
one Manhattan all evening
(if need be I can riff on “nursing” it).
And evoke what’s going to happen –
to the junior Senator from Massachusetts,
the Vice President, the Majority Leader,
Communism, nature –
as an absurdist fantasy (“Ionesco!” cries someone),
evoking general hilarity.
Only the occasional son or daughter,
preternaturally silent, takes it in;
I see the weirdness growing in their eyes.
(Turn pompous about art).
Still I wish I could call him …
I remember the number.
Someday perhaps, having the car filled
and windshield washed by a cheerful worker,
I’ll call from a payphone.
About the writer:
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems: The Adventure and Happiness (both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections of shorter poems: A Poverty of Words, (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape With Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and The Liberator (Survision Books, 2024). Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, among others.
Image: Politician by Alexey Akindinov (1977-). Oil on canvas. 115.5 x 83.5 cm. Between 2002 & 2003. By free license.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.
Explore O:JA&L’s Buttonhook Press offerings on Amazon.
Subscribe to the O:JA&L YouTube channel.
Become an O:JA&L Member through Patreon.
Follow O:JA&L on Facebook.
Support Pamelyn Casto’s text for writers: Flash Fiction: Alive in the Flicker
Support O:JA&L’s free presses.
