by Andrew Payton
In our first apartment, above the small
plaza where schoolchildren rehearse
their patriotism, and a fruit seller scatters
pigeons with her knife’s wooden butt
against the drum of a five-gallon bucket,
and over the river where mosquitoes breed
in mud and waste, we shut ourselves in
with the heat. The range ruptured the soft
belly of the sky and it rained at the same time
every day. Later, once the sun returned
ignorant and young and nylon push brooms
hissed across wet cobblestones, I bought
mangos because we wanted them, leaving
through a steel door shared with a papelería.
In the streets—and this I would remember
so many years later—I thought, so this
is the life I am living, as I dug for coins
in my pocket and placed them in the vendor’s palm.
If it weren’t for my own same yes,
which insist on being seen through,
I’m not sure even I would have believed
despite being the one doing the believing.
Andrew Payton is a writer, learning designer, and climate advocate living in Harrisonburg, Virginia with his partner and children. His work is featured or forthcoming in New Ohio Review, 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.
Hawaii Pacific Review 