In the dream, on the last day of class, I told them
I’d only been hired because everyone at all
qualified had been laid off
or quit. I was initially very reluctant.
So the night before the semester I made a
list of my fears, and (unfolding it)
would read it to them now. I had anticipated
people who couldn’t take in more
than a paragraph, fiction or non-, and would either
apologize wanly or ask if they’d ever
need to read more. I imagined various
militants triggered by instantaneous
baroque interpretations of the most
diffident phrases. Bipolar students
forgetting or renouncing
pills. Unbearable grinning
cadres of the regime compiling
unsecret reports, looking forward to my
being marched out ziptied, and their
cnidarian tradwives-in-training.
Then, predictably, I thought of all
the good I might yet do: a tearful
(but carefully unhugged) confession
of intolerable pressures, counseled;
two hours after class involving
a poem; the word “hegemony.”
There I more or less stopped.
Wondered, like you now, what they would say.
But you know what dreams are;
before the scene broke up
I was no longer sure
what it was, if I was teaching or had any status.
About the Author
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 four collections, 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).
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.
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