FRED POLLACK

Romance and Mystery

Mother, somewhat under

a century ago, is reading

an article in the Saturday Review

or perhaps the New Masses clarifying

Einstein. Yet why should she

be doing this? The kids she’ll

soon face are young and she

must teach them cursive and arithmetic,

not that stuff. Well, she thought

she should know. It’s hot

in the park. The breadline

on the next block slowly approaches

the Polish church. Either magazine

assures her that Hitler’s

brutalities as yet are greater

towards Communists than Jews.

At the speed of light, mass becomes infinite.

But what can that possibly mean?

She imagines herself skimpily,

futuristically dressed in some

Flash Gordon vehicle, and she and

the vehicle, moving impossibly fast,

swelling. At the edges

of the fantasy, before, aghast,

she shuts it down, it

squeezes aside her father, mother,

sisters, brothers, grandmother and

the three men who are interested

in her. Two are poets.

One is in love with himself:

he keeps half-written poems in

his typewriter, you see them when you enter

his flat. The second is in love with her,

but the Party wants him to move back

to St. Paul. She wonders what, in Freudian terms,

the drowsy vision meant.

Walks over to a stone

drinking fountain, moistens a hankie,

wipes her brow. The breadline progresses.

Kids from that block used to beat her up

when she was a kid because she

killed Christ. She remembers how

afraid she was of them. They were fear itself.

Fred Pollack, author of The Adventure, Happiness (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), 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, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com

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