Lip-Read Love Poem for Brother

by Andy Butter

Your fingers on my chin, reading my lips, we lay face to face
past bedtime while I wore the headphones to repeat Mitch
Hedberg’s perfectly timed punchline back to you. We
guffawed. Close like that our foreheads tingled. Magnetic
plates, we thought, or slivers of the other’s skull. When the
Civil War started spectators brought picnic lunches to watch
from across the Potomac. In the sonic shadow they saw the
charging men, flashing munitions but couldn’t hear a scrap
until the battle drew closer and the clamor overcame them like
when driving home for the first time with your new hearing
aids and the windows down you noticed the trees packed with
birdsong saying I always wondered where they went.
What use are they now, these lips like nightcrawlers, my
tongue a beating rain? What use am I now you don’t hear the
world first through my face?

Andy Butter is a lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he recently earned his MFA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Sierra Magazine, National Geographic Explorers Journal, Southeast Review, The Hunger, and elsewhere.