David Moolten

Peep Show

They started as tiny Renaissance paintings
one squinted at in a box, and there was an art
to being live, all male, all nude in a bookstore
with booths, not pretty, just young. Memory boasts 

the same clear barrier, your life that window,
admirers kept at arm’s length, the neighbor
who wooed you, age seven, a nymph
then a slutty butterfly who cheated 

and got cheated on, which led somehow to Jess,
who died, even the dark a revelation,
no slide latch or sticky floor, but some choices
stink more than Lysol and cigarettes. 

It's like feeding a slot your last quarter
to pine for who you were when you had the chance
to be someone else. Good taste long since leveled
those raw blocks, yet a shade abruptly rises 

on him, wide awake and unarousable
as Snow White, the panels like sides of a coffin,
the past a display case where like a gem
or wedge of diner cake he waits for the world 

to enter then walk out. It's obscene
because inches apart you can't change
a thing, just looking, but who can say for what,
the glass with its briefly devoted face.

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David Moolten’s chapbook, The Moirologist, won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition. He lives in Philadelphia.