Every Second Sunday - by Courtney Butler

Every Second Sunday

When we meet like this,
the lights low,
the curtains always shut,
she stands naked in front of her full-length mirror,
face flushed from the wine we finished downstairs,
and anxious for me.

I kneel in front of her
and begin to paint.

I brush the soft bristles over her belly.
She shivers.
A ballad this time,
line by line,
down the swell of her stomach
and around her navel.
She turns slowly,
slowly.
I drip prose down her thigh.
She drops her head back
and a sigh escapes her mouth.
Practice makes her turn again.
I paint tanka on her
lower back, her buttocks.
Standing up behind her,
my breath trailing up her spine,
she moves her hair.

Haiku is caressed
onto the nape of her neck
where the dark hair curls.

Her hands are braced flat on the mirror,
the gold ring clinking against its reflection.
Shoulder-blades bowed back and jutting,
breath coming faster.
Circling round her, I stroke iambic rhymes on the insides
of her wrists
and the crooks of her elbows.
She is shaking,
her knees giving way.

"Now" she pleads,
"Do it now."

Kneeling again
I read the ballad on her belly,
Slowly,
luxuriously,
carefully.
I whisper it close to her skin,
my words drying the paint as I recite.
I murmur every inch
of poetry and prose,
of rhythm and rhyme
cascading across her body.
The tremors rocket through her limbs,
but she makes no move to touch me.
She never does.
When I reach the back of her neck,
my tongue lolling on the secret words
by her curling hair
and behind her ear,
her back arches,
and she cries out,
falling to the floor.

Lips trembling, eyes glazed,
she looks on me and says,
"You can go now."

I gather my brush and paint,
and close the door behind me.
Every time I come here,
after I take the money on the front table
next to the empty bottle of wine,
I always wonder what she tells her husband
and how she explains the paint in her hair
when she can’t wash it away.