Jeffrey Kahrs
I Was Raised in a Potemkin Village
Tchaikovsky’s sugar plum fairies danced in the muck behind the affluent façade.
We came out on the streets every four years to greet the new emperor.
Public opinion came down on the side of fair housing: Potemkin Villages for everyone!
When it was voted down we put bumper stickers on our cars:
“We are still for Potemkin Villages!”
There was never enough to eat so we chewed on butter haloes
made of cheap margarine. They tasted grand spread on white bread.
We invited people regardless of race, creed or color to eat white bread.
A tuna sandwich was very valuable and easily traded for a Ding Dong
and a bag of barbeque chips.
Have you heard about those new buffalo chips? That’s the sort of joke
my father’s family told. They were not comedians.
Once I worked in a fish factory and spent my days slicing off salmon heads.
It’s all in the twist of the wrist.
In our village the fish scraps are sold to the nobility to feed our cuddly Cats.
Outside no one gives a fuck.
Outside things have a peculiar odor of excrement and sweat.
Inside is the scent of lavender and creams that smell like clay tiles in the showers of the rich.
Our stream runs through my poor man’s Fallingwater. The water fills a pond with soap
bubbles used to keep the water clear of scum.
There’s still scum on the water and algae on the bottom.
My feelings are hurt because I was promised large plate glass windows and plenty of sunlight.
Instead, these promises were photographed and posted in an obscure corner of the
internet with an arrow the size of the pinhead the angels dance on pointing to a postage-
stamp size picture of my Potemkin home with plate glass windows.
Isn’t it clear this is where the missus and me and our flock of children were supposed to
live before a complete stranger pointed our no one can live in a house the size of a
postage stamp.
But they can live in a Potemkin Village which the king visits every four years and people
come out on the street and wave because the exchequer has given them waving money.
They stash their money and other valuables in the safety of the Potemkin Village theater
and take the costume jewelry home because they are always uncertain how long they
will be able to maintain this standard of living.
We must never seek safety for the real thing.
What a beautiful day.
We are well represented.
The windows are large and the sky is blue.
It’s warm enough to wear shorts.
When my grandfather came to the United States his first job was putting together and
assembling Potemkin Villages. He worked in Hollywood for Mack Sennett.
He preferred spelunking to working in the movies and took a job in a borax mine so
everything would be clean, clean, clean
He buried a copper radiator in the ground and ran a wire to the top of the roof so he
could get the opera being broadcast from the great Potemkin Village of Los Angeles.
Being more of a Berlioz and Verdi man, he never cared for Tchaikovsky, but there was
only one station, so when the Nutcracker came on he listened… and
listened… and listened.
He waited for the Magic Flute but they played Tchaikovsky incessantly.
He never gave up hope.
One day soon he would move back to the great Potemkin Village and hear the Magic Flute again.
Jeffrey Kahrs is the author of One Hook at a Time: A History of the Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union of the Pacific (Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union, 2015), funded through a grant from 4Culture, the cultural funding agency for King County, Wash. Kahrs co-edited an issue of the Atlanta Review on poetry in Turkey (Spring/Summer 2006, Volume XII, Issue Number 2), and also co-edited a section of the Turkish translation magazine Çevirmenin Notu on English-language poets in Istanbul. His poetry has appeared in Subtropics, Talisman, and other journals. Kahrs was a 2012 winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Contest. He holds a BA in Dramatic Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MA from Boston University. He was born in the Hague, Netherlands, and raised in California.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.
Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, Va.