Ukraine – 19 Fremont’s by Walter Bargen

Half-buried in a drainage ditch

shortly after the Berlin Wall fell

and the Iron Curtain was pulled back.

At least, that’s the story I was told,

though I can’t remember who the teller was.

A Peace Corp volunteer was driving

from Krakow to Warsaw wondering if he still

had a job, an assignment, a duty to finish

what he started. He stopped on the shoulder

of the road a little uncertain what it was

he was seeing.

He knew it was a bronze statue

and from the size of the head,

the cap clearly belonging to the working class,

the mustache and goatee perfectly trimmed,

the eyes fixated on the future,

confident that nothing would delay or stop him,

that his victory was assured.

He hired a Polish crew with a crane and flatbed truck

to retrieve what turned out to be a twenty-foot

tall statue. He called back to Seattle

to convince friends to invest in a work

of social realism. He was convinced

that a museum would jump at the chance

to own the historic significance of this statue.

With a quarter million dollars in donations,

the statue crated, it was shipped halfway round the world

to be unloaded on the docks of Puget Sound.

After the restaurant owner died in a car wreck,

and no one would purchase the statue of Lenin,

no one believing its polished bronze would bring business

to a Slovak eatery in Issaquah. The city of Fremont,

a suburb of Seattle, offered a low concrete pedestal

at a dog’s hind-leg bend on Fremont Avenue

where three side streets entangled obliquely.

It stood there for decades in front of a Taco del Mare.

Soon after its placement, Lenin was attacked

with strings of Christmas lights,

Styrofoam snowballs placed in each hand,

a cone-shaped Santa hat to cover his own.

Capitalism sent Taco del Mare sailing into bankruptcy

to be replaced by Psychic Journey, offering Tarot Readings

and Chakra Balancing, spelled out in neon lights

below the Doric Lodge No.92 with the Masonic Symbol

painted on the brick wall above and behind the new business.

Lenin unperturbed in his ever present first step,

until splashed with a gallon of yellow paint

that ran down the wrinkled furrows on the right side

of his trench coat and a gallon of blue paint

running down along the fields on the left side

of his coat. His pace uninterrupted, fingers dripping red.

This ancient tale of conquest and maniacal empire expansion,

a photographer takes a picture of a man pissing

on a giant leg of Lenin in its permanent Fremont home.

When asked if this was a political statement,

the relieved man answered

in a heavy Eastern European accent, No comment.