Poems

SUJI KWOCK KIM Notes from Utopia, Inc. for my grandfather 1 Who minds the minders? To watch them watch you watch them watch each other watching you, as you walk along the Taedong River, down Revolution Avenue to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, past the Monument to the Martyrs of the People’s Party, past the guard-towers and interrogation rooms, labyrinths of cinderblock and barbed-wire and steel, each face shadowed by that looked-at look, as rush-hour crowds descend escalators underground to “the deepest subway on earth,” aka “the largest nuclear bomb-shelter on earth,” blast-doors sealed against anthrax or radiation, the exit that is not an exit. Thunder of wheels on tracks. A train’s iron scrape and drag. Name the stations: Comrade, Red Star, Golden Fields, Paradise. Giant photos of the Great Leader hang on every wall, staring at you like a shorter, fatter Mao – the dictator’s dead grandfather still “Eternal President,” the only corpse on the planet holding executive office. As if all the world were underworld. Why did you come here, among the marching soldiers, singing factory-workers, dancing schoolchildren, what are you trying to find? We’re all brothers and sisters, we have nothing to fear: our father is here. You cannot not see the other life you might have lived, the not-I in the I, the never in the now.

32 The Poetry Review