by Frederick Pollack
He referred to his miracles
as tricks. His favorite was,
in a brilliant lovely female voice,
to say the most heartening thing
imaginable—it made you cry;
then with a wagging monitory finger
make you hear it again and see
the speaker—an angel;
something venomous; back.
His substantive message was that he had
no power. Power belongs to God,
who contains and therefore is (“you know this”)
evil; whose cops (“I’m quoting someone”)
occupy every corner
of the universe (“and can you really call them
corrupt?”); and whom
he flees forever farther down
into eternity, searching for an out.
Before he left he explicitly forbade
a church, but if with our usual
weakness we built one, “Make
sure it’s manned by people like me,
fearful fugitive homeless—and be
prepared to find them gone, the accounts empty.”
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; reissued April 2022 by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and three collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse and elsewhere. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
Little Leaf Literary Journal 