Page 24 - WTPVolI Vol.#4

Philip James Kobylarz
The Utopia of You
If only there were as many Waldens as there were zoos. Think of how many low-quality Basque restaurants could pop up in places like Idaho, a state in which every city closes down at six-thirty p.m. because that’s when it’s time to re-enter the calendar background people inhabit there and think about how they will not be able to escape, next morning.
Try to count the near perpetual sushi restaurants where they give out free rounds of bar- gain grocery-store saké, because it is that context that can change perceptions, and a cedar-wood box drinking vessel to decorate and then adorn the place that no one ever has any intention of returning to, and thus a gimmick is born and another fire hazard is made, and the owner of the store, who is stuck in a place like Wichita, Kansas, can only hope that when the angel of death comes, she will be swift and merciful and soon.
Not many are even capable of catching the irony of the dummies on Olvera Street who are as light as the day is long there, wearing Gaucho clothing as if to signify those bizarre capitalist desires of the people who visit that brick-lined paradise, desiring to own a little piece of Mexico without ever going and tasting the lard that that country’s compatriots must now settle for, wondering if life was really so much worse there.
Finally, it becomes one long highway run, and for brief moments, there is the treat of dawn erupting through clouds, suggesting that at least in nature, Neoclassicism is not dead, or there is a collection of foldable lawn chairs strewn into a ditch that just beg the viewer to try them out and check out the view of absolutely nothing because haven’t we seen it all, from geysers in winter to children skiing through the Alps, to billiard tables made out of glass, to pumpkins the size of rooms, and all of this, the catalogue raisonné of the Twin Peaks episode we always seem to find ourselves in, makes us continually hunger for that cabin in the woods in which, of course if it had has internet, where we could get away from it all.
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Kobylarz has worked as a journalist and film critic for newspapers in Memphis, TN. His work has been published in The Paris Review and The Best American Poetry series, among others. He is the author of a book of poems concerning life in the south of France and a short story collection titled Now Leaving Nowheres- ville. His creative nonfiction collection All Roads Lead from Massilia is available from Everytime Press of Adelaide, Australia; A Miscellany of Diverse Things is available from Brooklyn’s Lit Riot Press; and Dos Madres Press has published Kanji Amerikana. His forthcoming book is Giant Tiny Stories.