Husbands’ Brothers
You don’t notice them at first, leaning against the back walls of his life, now yours. You register the hair on one who’s playing guitar: long, luxuriant. Collected in a casual ponytail. Who wouldn’t? But that detail mixes with all the others. Sister’s dolls (she’s thirty). Father’s scrappy immigrant stories. Mother’s good calves and surface reserve you go on to discover runs bone deep. All the second-hand furniture of marriage. The package deal. One year, at a wedding reception, your eye falls from a distance on your husband beside one brother. You glance from one to the other and note the receding chin you’ve learned to love corrected. Stooped shoulders you’d recognize anywhere, uncurl. Erect and strange. Then your own blades rise and flare. You flip from one to the other: a time-lapsed blooming and collapse. Thin arms you know so well bulk up. And in place of the goofy wisps you’ve gladly kissed, oh god: all that hair. Something in your stomach catches and unfurls. Then you want your husband’s brother right there on the buffet table. By the mini-wieners. On an Easter visit, you start to think it would be so easy to hold his gaze a moment too long across the dinner table—to prolong a hug beats beyond. So easy some night padding back from the bathroom to slip invisible into the elsewhere he is and down all that familiar difference. Not cheating, really. Just moving a bit to the right on a sliding scale. He is your husband already in another dimension. The man who stands before the fun house mirror. His face, your husband’s, three steps off. What’s been ragged, missing, askew, slanted takes on the symmetry of imagined second chances. Not a cabana boy in Fiji. Your own life. Just much better. The life you could have lived, could still if … you could undo this one. Thanksgiving. He’s up for second helpings in the kitchen and you spot what you’d missed: the brother’s duck walk. Back at the table, you watch. He swats away serious questions and praises a yogi’s levitation. His wife’s sighs settle on your side of the table. You look down: your husband’s plate. The back of his hand holding a knife. Stiff black hairs against the shock of white. You feel the smooth cool of his crescent calf within your palm. Like a breast. Not you. You. Not you. Still. Again! Moons and moons and moons ago this man lay your faithless body down on the hard, worn floor of an inner chamber. You used to think you never would be happy. You scoot up to the shabby laden table. You choose again, what you chose before.
Cunnilinguistics
Even the name sounded dirty to us. Over cheese fries at the bowling alley and later in Julie’s den between crunches of Doritos, as if our mobile tongues were performing cunnilingus on our own mouths just saying the word aloud. Which we’d try a few times, tongue lingering on the un’s languorous rumble, then lifting tip to flick top palette, flash of pink from wide stretched mouths, KUNNNNNNNNNNN – ilingus, cunni – LINNNNNNNNG – gus, until we collapsed onto shag carpet in guffaws and pronounced our verdict with o my gods and a drawn out eeeeewwwwww, scrunching our eyes and mouths, shaking our heads, hair swirling, the word being too much like thing, too much like inhabiting our own bodies open to pleasure, how could we come right out and name what we desire? ___ Born and raised in Michigan, Lisa K. Roberts has taught literature and composition in Hong Kong, Charlottesville, Virginia, Las Vegas, and Lincoln, Nebraska. After moving to Iowa City, she worked as Assistant Director of the Iowa Youth Writing Project to bring free creative writing workshops to children. Today she serves as Director of Iowa City Poetry, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to sharing poetry resources with writers of all ages, incomes, identities, and experience levels. Her poetry has been published in Plainsongs, The Untidy Season, Little Village, and she has been a featured spoken word performer at various venues, including Voice Box, Was the Word, NewBo PoJam, and Poetry in Motion.