Albino Carrillo

A Letter to My Brothers and Sisters
in North Korea

Where will all the music go if you bomb us?
Do the fashion magazines lie?
I hate to be serious, North Korea.

But there are stations playing all night here
and sometimes the diskjockeys spin
old dreams of love
almost no one knows, awkward frequencies
announcing us to the stars.

I've heard of your masses
starving in railway stations.
Your cobbler sick hue
won't keep me from calling you.

I don't have any apples.
There's no way all the TV stations could lie.
Your cobbler sick hue
won't keep me from calling.

North Korea, in one of my magazines
there's a girl without shoes. In one of my tea cups
a .30 caliber bullet, an indescribable lotus
blossom wrapped crudely in wax.

It's for when you cross the sea
in your rocket
of the thousand petaled sun
so bright, so bright.

But before that happens
I'm calling your sons and daughters
to tell them that evil red communism
never happened here--
we're happy watching beautiful
models and basketball players--
that evil red communism
failed here and will always fail
here because we have the Dodgers
and full supermarkets
and lovely green rooms
under the Rockies
where our warriors sleep
in their own slow radiation.

But this argument, too, has ended.

Sadly, and terribly
atoms conspire against us
generals conspire against
all of our favorite songs
to keep us from knowing
our bodies, our hands
how we might mingle
or touch.

Radios are a must, North Korea.

For if I choose to love you
anymore, with your winter
hats made of coyote fur,
and the children you drop off at the zoo,
I'll have a song in my head
for all the dead ever did to you,
a gift from the stars

that sounds almost new.

Copyright © Albino Carrillo, 1999.  All Rights Reserved.

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