IN THE HALL OF SCULPTURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS
I watch the man I used to buy pornography from
when I was sixteen years old. He must be 400
pounds now and gets around with a walker.
His skin is pale as a graveyard moon, with lesions
running down the sides of his loosened face.
His hair is wisps which curl behind his earlobes.
Strange to see him out from the counter,
ten years later and long after hauling all of that
to the county dump once I’d started getting laid.
Strange to see him so altered by that time,
as if his own body were trying to droop
away from him and down onto the masonry.
The man sits upon his stool of bent tubing
looking at the artwork but mostly the people.
Even now I worry he’ll ask for my ID.
Of course he doesn’t and doesn’t appear
interested in me at all. I take this as good news
and move past the nudes toward the abstracts.
Caleb Barber received an MFA in poetry from the Whidbey Writers Workshop. His poems have been most recently published in Los Angeles Review, Makeout Creek, and Forge as well as a feature in Poet Lore.