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      September 30, 2015Keychain Peep ShowWilliam Trowbridge

      I found it in my parents’ room.
      center-bottom dresser drawer,
      beneath the socks: a little plastic scope
      with a naked woman posed inside,
      breasts uplifted, red hair flowing down,
      a globe balanced on one shoulder,
      like Atlas in my Classics comic book
      and seeming from that nether world.
      I peeped and peeped again, felt brash
      as Peeping Tom, who eyed Godiva’s
      plenty as she rode through Coventry,
      past discreetly shuttered windows;
      randy as the lecher leering
      at his master’s wife undressing
      in the nickel peep show classic
      What the Butler Saw; licentious
      as those elders ogling Susanna
      at her bath among the honeysuckle.
      But I felt more like Howard Carter
      at his first peep through the door
      to Tutankhamun’s shadowed chambers
      when asked if there was anything
      inside to see. “Yes,” he said.
      “Wonderful things.”

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      William Trowbridge

      “One day while studying for my PhD comps, I came across a group of Howard Nemerov poems in the old Brinnin and Read anthology. I was bitten, seriously bitten, couldn’t stop going back to them—their music, their intelligence, their electrical charge. And then I wrote a poem. That afternoon, I was, to use a John Crowe Ransom word, ‘transmogrified’ from a budding scholar into a seedling poet. But I had neither the time nor the money to go through an MFA program. So, after graduation and in my ‘spare time’ from teaching, I continued my poetry-writing education in the college of monkey-see-monkey-do, happily learning from the poems of great, hand-picked tutors. I still attend.”

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