Babar
They shot your mother and you screamed
until she explained, go back to sleep.
Allentown’s south side was a jungle,
hockshops, drug corners, always cars
“backfiring.” She lied as the world suggested,
to save you from whomever it feared
you were. In a ritual of doing
her bosses’ work for them even when not
bent over it, she caressed and broke the spines
of old cloth books she read aloud,
too thick-skinned to be insulted
by their colonial nostalgia in her voice,
let you graze with your own eyes on the story
of her civilization, assimilate
every paternalistic crumb. You rooted
for its mascot, putting along paved roads
in his outlandish suit. She wished you droll
like that, trained to be worthy of cartoons,
if not art. But when the lights went out
the truth snuck in like a man with a gun.
Hester Prynne as a Man
Maybe the stewed cook never woke
in the walk-in pantry to find your mouth
accommodating his large member.
But with a little research,
all those smirks at the diner
became seamy facts: you once studied
dance, had an art deco lamp,
and if he’d lied his whole life
you did stand lonely and alone
with him a full ten minutes. The owner called
everyone he paid minimum wage
family, being a joke your price
to belong. Of course the waiters chose you
for the drag role in the Halloween skit.
A smooch was just a smooch,
but the day you quit, the cook’s girlfriend
wore a tight dress in the parking lot
like she wanted the world
to see by perverse contrast the fruitlessness
of your love. If coming anywhere near
your slander-infected person
made him a leper, she was Old Testament,
an incredulous river
of curses: her contempt for you
fully cleansed him.
David Moolten's last book, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition. He lives in Philadelphia.
Photo credit: Somchai Kongkamsri