Coffee on Thursday

By Benjamin Bellet

—but mostly,

what I did was endure it.
I remember that first night.

After the sparklers and all, marriage
just seemed to stretch on.

Within the first month
he couldn’t get it up.

There was a time I thought
you could get used to anything.

I was young, twenty-four—
you remember me then.

The way we’d find ourselves
fucking before

we knew what was happening,
panting after something

I think we both very much
wanted to know—back when

you could still get in the Orchid Lounge
without waiting an hour,

and afterward I’d wake you
again around four

so you wouldn’t get sick in my bed.

Now it all seems so adorable,
albeit predictable—

These days,

even those memories of
when we were so young,

wild and deeply concerned
have largely faded,

save a few, sharper

by virtue of shame
or pleasure—though

even what’s remembered as pleasure

(take, for instance, that moment
in the hungover abandon

of your Kansas duplex,

when I looked back at you,
asking for it again) is merely

the further knowledge
such moments promised,

which time would prove false,
amounting thus

to shame.

The next day, you left for Kuwait
and I went back to Tennessee.

Mom’s house isn’t even there now.
Gentrification, I guess—they rebuilt it—

now it only goes back
half as far.

I remember we’d prop
the cabinets with books,

and Dad lived down Twelfth,
all faux-gaslights now. East Nashville

will never be the same.

But don’t worry—

I didn’t ask you here
to “catch up” as a pretense

for involving you in some
extramarital last-gasp dalliance

in hopes of escaping
the long line of disappointments

my life has become
—and I am glad you’re sober. But

there is one thing I do still
wonder. In fact,

facing you now,

it’s the same thing I was really asking
looking back at you then—as if

hearing the answer
would have made any difference.

****

Benjamin Bellet is a clinical psychologist and former U.S. Army infantry officer. He served for five years on
active duty, deploying to Afghanistan in 2011 and Kuwait in 2014. He currently teaches psychotherapy and treats young adults with serious mental illness in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the winner of the Poetry Prize in the 2024 Armed Services Arts Partnership Anthology, and his poems have been published in the Colorado Review, MAYDAY Magazine, and elsewhere.