Utopia Now (Poem)

Utopia Now by Marie Fujimoto

the city is overwhelmingly tall, bright, gleaming in eye-stabbing glory all glass and contours a museum built atop coffins stacked end to end, constantly recycled from a slave’s graveyard.

the sun paints every skyscraper using the same dull palette, a wide brush, and strong vertical strokes renewing each day, the thick bars of our chosen prison.

when the sun is finished with the day, and has packed and gone, the city blooms like an electric flower, whose crystalline edges are highlighted in neon and stainless steel high above the pools of blood, the chunks of flesh, pulverized bone but not far enough to get away from smoke in the wind.

hidden in every pocket carried in every hand pressed to every ear invisibly listening, recording unblinking lenses capture frames of lives and store them for later use by the Force of Law or their faceless cowardly Catchers, keeping us in an endless line of cubbyholes and cubicles— one long ice tray from sink to freezer.