Antietam

by

Frederick Pollack

They park at all the white,
pitted, indistinguishable statues
and iron plaques. The words
enhance her nightmare: like paragraphs
freed from a textbook, looming
in the summer air. A breeze
rattles the cornstalks
surrounding each stop but does not lift
the heat. A stone has
invaded a sneaker. Her blouse sticks.
 
Only the song – some young white
imitating some young black’s
frenetic rhyming and rage aimed
at any emerging target – makes
time pass correctly:
impersonal, full, and swift. Where the dead lay
five deep (her father keeps repeating)
on a weird, sunken road
from nowhere to nowhere she hangs back
and will not remove her headphones.
 
He…they…his constant talking,
then smiling as if,
in the absence of response,
he heard and applauded himself.
Lame, stifled “orders.”  Baldness
and sweatstains.  Her mother’s
familiar distraction
except from obscure concerns
about indecorum is now,
by comparison, bearable,
 
so much being wrong with the day.

 

 

 

 

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press. Other of his poems and essays have appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Fulcrum, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Representations and elsewhere. Poems have most recently appeared in the print journals Iota (UK), Orbis (UK), Naked Punch (UK), Magma (UK), and The Hat.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Snorkel, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Denver Syntax, Barnwood, elimae, Wheelhouse and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Mudlark. Pollack is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, DC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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