By Andrew Payton

It is eight years now
and I still think of how you did not ask

that I look away
when you stripped sweat-soaked polyester

after our games of badminton, or how
you hefted the weight of the couch

onto your haunches while I rested
a hand underneath,

pivoting uselessly, or how
on the mountain you took

my blistered heels into your hands
and wrapped the wounds, replaced

my socks with your own, or how
before dinner you went into the basement

for a bottle of that Czechoslovak vodka
you bought in cases the November when students

flooded Prague, little water
you called it, and then

you inventoried forest biomass in Poland
and cheeks reddened with drink

theorizing
there were not enough trees for the furnaces, and,

touching the wool of your blue
peacekeeping beret, you

speak of the Serb who
served coffee from his porch in the morning

that was a smoldering crater by afternoon,
always you say goodbye you say in

the English you learned on Ohio construction sites
which never quite lost the pneumatic pop

of a nail driver, or how
the evening before I would leave

your wife threw me against the wall and bit my ear,
and I thought how

over the years with you
she must have forgotten to fuck

with anything
but violence.

---

Andrew Payton is a writer, learning designer, and climate advocate living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with his partner and children. His work appears in Nimrod, Poet Lore, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, and elsewhere, and won the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. He is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University.