The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest

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Divorce

My husband had honey-colored eyes and honey-colored hair
and he broke his teeth into the flesh of a strawberry
as though it were something to jump rope with, never a bleed
of juice left on his lips.

His shoulders were shrined in cotton year-round,
taut to the bone with summer rituals of baling hay, and in winter
the rigor of shovels or pulling our children in sleds.

He could bounce a smile off an egg freshly dropped
from our chickens in the barn behind the house where he spent hours
adapting the rhythm of a pitchfork to his tenor—

its strong, sonorous vibrato rising over the grunts of his horses,
all of which he nuzzled daily, kissed, and called by name,

commanding them to lift their legs, inspecting their hooves,
digging mud and rock out of their shoes; and they did with ease,
because they knew he loved them.

He would, with equal care, tighten the lids on every jar of jam
we canned together with berries we had picked together,
cleaned, then cooked. And after a long day of barn work and jars
cooling on towels in the kitchen, he’d wash the sweat off of his body
in the shower, careful to turn on the overhead fan to keep
the bathroom from filling with steam.

That night, I would lie next to him in bed and, with my eyes,
rove the stubble on his jaw, under his chin, down the steeple
of his neck, answer the shallow of his breath with my questions.

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