by David Moolten
“It was a favorite exercise with Andersen to read aloud his fairy tales . . .”
For campy, pearl-clutching furor
nothing beats a library. That’s where to find
small children in MAGA hats,
a pastor with his outdoor voice
trumpeting the apocalypse.
Meanwhile, Ariel, replete with green sequins
and a strapless scallop bra, tells her side.
What could be more wholesome
than Hans Christian Andersen? Just look
at his middle name. Yet all his life he danced
around what he called the femininity
of his nature, everything he wrote
was an unrequited wish, an ignoble prayer.
He let it go, threw it back to the world,
a love letter to his friend Edvard
dressed as a harmless fairy tale.
It could never happen, the painful
sublimation from swishy-tailed fluke
into person. The children sit rapt,
even innocent, hearing candor
so whimsical, so subtle,
it’s mute, part of the mermaid’s
three hundred years of penance,
that she might finally have a soul.
David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won Truman State University’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2009. His chapbook, The Moirologist, won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.