Andrew Payton
​Image by Daria Liudnaya                                                                              
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, The Chicago Tribune, 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.



Pathology
after Eduardo Corral


               20 gallons of water & salt
in a mildewed tub—
                           patellofemoral pain,
blood in snot,
             myopic, hypertensive—
                          I celebrate

             this body
pluming out different lengths
                           of breath
like fire on wet log
             like faithful river
                          in old country.

             It will drown you
in your own lungs—
                           diphenhydramine—
the IV slips from her veins
             & I slip
                          to the floor.

             Buckets of cold light
wake me
                          concussed,
I celebrate this body:
              more I beg
                            this body.

              A delicious mango
roils my gut
                           & in fever dream
ceiling fan throbs
             the steady drumbeat
                           of my underworld.

             A screw tightens
between shoulder blades,
                           a vice
jaw’s threading
             squeak by squeak.
                          I saw a foot

             through disintegrated
cloth: bones broken,
                         warped, recovered.
Imagine the hobble,
                    the sway
                         of bundled load.

                    In this bed
of warbled breath,
                          we are one body
wrapped in a skin
of brick, surviving
              on radio waves.


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