Chris L. Butler

The Engineer’s Fire

When I was a boy, a Buddhist monk
lit himself ablaze on a 1960s page

            of my history textbook. In 2024,
            American Airman Aaron Bushnell

self immolates on social media.
Now, we hear the fire in color

            we feel the flames flare across
            his skin as he lets out a shriek

for Palestinian freedom. My wife
asks me if this will be the toppling

            tower that makes the administration
            say, Enough—since libraries, hospitals,

and universities  did not make the nations
say, Enough! One week at work I asked

            the board of directors if 30,000 skulls
            was enough for them to speak against

the genocide. They scoffed at my
statistics and dismissed them as myth

            which is to say, for them no number
            will be enough. I’m almost certain

that ever since Aaron screamed
Free Palestine! His mother has cried

            enough gasoline tears, to light up
            a football stadium from the top row.

A feeling of endless fiery droplets
raining down until we all are free. 

Chris L. Butler is a Black American-Dutch poet-essayist born and raised in Philadelphia, PA living in Canada. He is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Sacrilegious (Fahmidan Publishing & Co, 2021). His work can be read in The Pinch, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, APIARY Mag, Variant Literature, Lucky Jefferson, and others. He is a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 1x Best of the Net nominee. Chris is the Editor in Chief of The Poetry Question, and the Associate Poetry Editor at Bending Genres.

Irving Benitez

I STILL MISGENDER MYSELF WHEN CYNDI LAUPER PLAYS

            After Lyd Havens

As the last note of Silver Springs plays
                        and in the liminal space between songs in the club,
            I think I spot myself on the dancefloor.
I know no one is stupid enough to bring a child to a queer club,
            especially a four-year-old.
 
I see her there and she runs to the crowd
            and I have to be a babysitter for myself as the songs change,
            it’s not quite 70’s discotheque, but close enough.
As I push my way through the sea of people
                                    I spot her
 
                        in the center of the dance floor
 
            as the first notes of Cyndi Lauper start playing.
I think of all the times I used to refuse dresses,
                         how I grew out my hair at five to hide behind it,
             how I used to racehorse to the end of my own life,
and it is wiped away as I see her look at me,
            as she reaches out her hands
                        to a man she’s never seen before and
                                                never will know, and yet she does.
 
As I take her hands and she stands on my feet,
            the echoes of the 80’s, times long past,
            the so many we’ve lost and the many we’ve gained,
sound in my ears.
 
            And we dance.
Then it hits me. It’s trans night.
            And everyone here is dancing with a version of themselves
                        they thought they would never reach.
           
            I can’t help the tears as they fall, euphoria hitting all at once.
            She comforts me, and she is me and I am she and we are he.
 
I cry into her shoulder and tell her
                                    You will make it.
 
                                                As Cyndi Lauper plays
           
We’re not the fortunate ones, oh
  [             ] just wanna have fun.

Irving Benitez (he/him) is a trans, queer, multi-disabled poet, writer, and performer from North East Ohio. He hopes you enjoy his work. You can find Irving everywhere online under either @Jellyfishlines or @Sea_Minor_ on Twitter and at Bluesky @jellyfishlines.bsky.social and @seaminor.bsky.social.

C.C. Apap

the god of my father

when we were children, all
of us were ill one sunday.
you played at priesthood,
refusing to let the ceremony
wither in our lives a single
week. you handed the book
to me to read. you blessed
a glass goblet held trembling
in both hands, tore off wonder
bread and called it eucharist.
 
what do you do now when only
one is gathered in his name?
stone tiles bite at your knees.
the sun sears your eyes there
in the mountains, where man
has always sacrificed—closer
to god. you become abraham,
doubting if you have sacrificed
too much, everything. unsure
why no angel appeared, no
struggling ram lay in the bush.

C.C. Apap grew up in the kind of Detroit suburb that had a functioning farm just over the back fence. Now a special lecturer at Oakland University, his poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Dunes Review, Genuine Gold, Eunoia Review, Belt Magazine, Alba, The Thimble Literary Magazine, and The Hooghly Review.

Anastasia Nikolis

Transfiguration

Newspapers say it’s ‘the astronomy of our bodies’—some
nonsense about overexposure to sunlight or too many
stars. But I think they just don’t know what to say when
our loved ones explode into supernovas. One young
couple, posed for a human-interest piece, saw his arms and
her legs flap into orbit. They survive mostly intact dragging
their losses, small galaxies, where their limbs used to be. In
the cover photo they stand together watching the sky, the
lift of their chins just grave enough. Other stories suggest
it’s something in the tapwater, radium or extra fluoride,
percolating in the bloodstream and mingling with plasma
that morphed an old woman’s clavicle to a Moka caffé
pot handle. People pored over her story. Her posture on
the stovetop was impeccable. Every day, news outlets
interview another doctor reporting an unusual spike in
cases of Transfiguration. They say it’s a disaster of bodies
trying to be what they’re not. But maybe they are merely
bodies longing to be stars.

Anastasia Nikolis is an Assistant Professor of English at St. John Fisher University. Her academic research focuses on confession and intimacy as linguistic constructions in post-1945 American poetry. In her creative writing, she explores the intersections of visual art, place, and the body. You can find her work in Stone Canoe, Arkansas International, The LA Review of Books, and The Adroit Journal.

Eloise Langan

Grafting

I loved a pianist once.
I loved his fingers.
I loved a poet in his monochromatic corner of the universe.
I loved a street sweeper and dined on vegetable soup from a can
and day-old biscotti while he had a cigarette,
and I played with the lighter and burned myself twice by accident and once on purpose.
I loved a banker, even when he bored me.
I loved a tour guide named Simon on the Amalfi Coast.
I loved a wizard, and he turned me into a fawn without a mouth,
decided he did not like me being so quiet, and turned me into a sperm whale;
My calls
 and calls
and calls
were amplified by the barnacles and ulcers that littered the cannon of my mouth.
I fucked a man whose face I continue to hate.
 
The worst mistake I ever made was
taking an actor for a lover,
he showed me all that I could not have
and left me with nothing but a dime, half of a kiss, and a CD.
I still haven’t listened to it.
 
Did you know that on wool farms,
if a Mother’s lamb dies, they take the skin of the child,
and drape it over an orphaned lamb,
so the mother will take them in?
I hear that boys do this to themselves every day.

Eloise Langan (she/her) is a writer, artist, and student of theatre and film at Dartmouth College hoping to pursue a career in comedy writing. When she is not writing poetry, plays, or sketches, she passes the time obsessively annotating Joan Didion essays, looking up cool facts about whales, and sending recordings of her subpar guitar covers of Bob Dylan songs to her father.

Luke Janicki

In Prague

In Prague, I don’t want to look anything up
any longer. I want to go to the Kafka bookstore
that is not the Kafka bookstore.
 
I want to see the mammoth ivory under glass again
and still be in awe when it turns out to be resin,
ask nonplussed, how did they create
such a likeness, such resin.
 
I want the swarm of students to flank the bench
I am sitting on by the Pantheon atrium
outside the second floor bathroom.
A girl will step on my shoe
 
barely apologizing, and an otherwise-prominent
corner room is filled with a single rhinoceros skeleton
seven feet long like a middle-aged man
shooting hoops alone in a gymnasium.
 
I want one brick that probably comprised a whole wall
once to be the most striking object
I see today. Yes, that did belong to a wall.
 
Here is the wall in plastic now, someone else’s alcove
blocking my way around the entire
neoclassical museum I have misunderstood.
 
I wanted there to be Muchas. I wanted
the only Muchas to have been printed
to adorn these central ramparts where now extend:
minerals without number, an evolution of frogs,
 
the stem from the last fern tree found in our country.
I want to correct the caption to “their” county,
removing myself and other travelers.
 
I put out my hand into the next dim conclave
as if wading through fronds set against me
by my creator;
I am not Wenceslas walking.
 
I am evading children with a practiced coldness
still unsure of which king is the “good,”
which St. Agnes’s brother, or which
 
clock will tell me when I’ve arrived
beyond my conceit for the building, the sky,
to reveal to me every answer.
 
I grasp about for foliage of my self-inhumation;
in burial, I will bring all once-treebound limbs
to the ground, their eventual place
of growth, prematurely.
 
Off the path, I want for nothing,
an anti-beggar unencumbered of need
and its notions, a soldier laying down
waiting for the enemy to pass.
 
The king moves toward his goal in the night,
and a steam, having to do more with natural history
than art, rises from footfalls in the snow
but not mine. Yes, not mine.

Luke Janicki lives in Seattle, Washington. He has published poetry in Trampset, Dipity Literary Magazine, Quarter Press, Apricot Press, Floating Bridge Press and other publications. He holds a B.A. from Gonzaga University and an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame.

Tate Lewis-Carroll

13 Ways of Looking at Dead Deer

            After Wallace Stevens

1.

From the edge of a harvested field,
the only moving thing
was a shell
from the oiled dark of a gun.

 

2.

I was of 15 minds,
like a photograph of my stepfather
cocking his first trophy buck.

 

3.

Venison
from the deep freezer—
thawing.

 

4.

A stepfather and a stepson
are divided.
A stepfather and a stepson and a dead deer
are no less divided.

 

5.

Where do they meet:
the silence after
blowing a deer call,
the silence before
a distant reply?

 

6.

Camouflage filled the blind
with barbaric foliage.
Not a single shadow
crossed our line of sight.
Two kinds of silence
deadened the drive home:
disappointment and relief.

 

7.

O rural cul-de-sacs,
how can you wish them dead?
Can you not see the hoofprints
left here long before
our people arrived?

 

8.

DEER XING AHEAD—
light passes through
bullet holes
in the leaping silhouette.

 

9.

Where the deer dropped out of sight
marked the beginning
of one of his stepfather’s few prides.

 

10.

spotted
along the timberline—
two fawns

 

11.

He rode over Michigan
in a pick-up. Pothole—
the bound snout
lurched forward.
He mistook that for life.

 

12.

New snow has fallen.
Surely the trail its body drug
has recovered by now.

 

13.

The glass eyes,
mounted in his garage,
can no longer distinguish between our faces
through years of dust.

Tate Lewis-Carroll (they/them) is the author of What's Left (Finishing Line '23), a chapbook of haiku, Blind to the Prairie (forthcoming from Bottlecap), and has been nominated for the Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Award for an Individual Poem in 2023. Their work can be found in Hotel Amerika, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and other journals. Find them on Instagram @TateLewisCarroll.

Cheyenne Evans

Release

with a big breath
and long exhale
i walk myself through the steps
spread your legs
slightly apart
right under your hips
my tumbling coach watching
as i moved into alignment
 
the first time i heard it
it struck me as a phrase i would never forget
women—tumble from their hips,
men—from their shoulders
‘your power’
he would tell me
comes from my hips
i looked down
expecting
suited armor
or a cape to believe
that it was true
 
my hips were my burden
mexican birthing hips
inherited from my mother
and her mother
and her mother
weight made its home there
jeans stopped before they could get over the hills of my body
 
othered
until a few years ago brands remembered that not all women had slim bodies
i’ve carried babies there
 awkwardly
nieces and nephews with
dangling legs and flailing arms
tilting my frame to carry their
weight
 
hips
carrying more than they were meant to
pushing pain and its disciples there
unintentionally
 
movement
freed me from the torturous pain
stacking my body
in order to control my isolations
allowing my hips to dip right
fully supported by my stance
reminding me of my power
flow
transforming into a
shiny
impenetrable force of
armor

Cheyenne Evans is a Mexican and Black poet from the south suburbs of Chicago, who writes and dances as authentically as she speaks. Surrounded by the ocean and mountains in the PNW, she creates art that explores the complexities of human emotions, relationships and the delicate dance between dreams and reality.

Margaret McGowan

Regrets

There is something
I’ve never told anyone,
 
regrets are hazardous,
like when curiosity
 
seekers try to get a closer
look at a UFO and instead
 
get abducted.
Like a murder of crows
 
that follow you down
the street at night wearing
 
nothing but pea coats
with large buttons,
 
you try to befriend them
with breadcrumbs—
 
that’s not what they want
beware!
 
I have seen UFOs. I have seen
Cessnas alight onto day lilies.
 
I have seen moths that pretend
to be butterflies. I have seen
 
the back of you as you walked
past me, the heels of your shoes
 
and the collar of your button-
down shirt. I was hiding
 
in the bushes. I wanted
to surprise you.
 
A wilted daffodil
in my teeth.

Margaret McGowan has a BA in English Education from UAlbany, State University of New York and is the author of Ancestors and Other Poems (2021). She was a finalist in the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest and received an Honorable Mention in the HVWG Poetry Contest 2019. Her poems have been published in Qu, Hobart, Moon Park Review, The Raven Review, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Michele Johnson

Ode to a Writing Prompt

Which I chew / until my mouth fills / with broken glass. My husband walks to the pantry. / He wraps his arm around my shoulders. / He has questions but asks / only one: Cookie / (this is his name for me) / if you sort your life into prose poems / and place them on the shelf between the peaches / and the apple-pear jelly, don’t you think / they will be more palatable? / I consider boiling / the cold linoleum floor / four quarts at a time / while all twelve children / clamor up my legs listening for the lids / to pOp / as they seal. / But as the children lean in / they only hear their grandmother whisper / h-u-s-h / now child go to sleep / from a stranger’s bed. My husband runs / his finger over each of my / bruised / vertebrae. / pOp. pOp. pOp. / I turn to face his beautiful mouth. / He still has all thirty-two Mason jars / screwed in like lightbulbs / where other people have teeth.

There / on the tip of his tongue / is a poem.

Michele Johnson lives in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. You can find her on Instagram @thelyricalwild.

David Wojciechowski

THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT JOURNEY

after A One Way Ticket Mr. Z, d. Z. Kudła, 1992

I’m sitting on a train folding bits of paper into
unrecognizable shapes. This is a boat collecting life
preservers. This is the ocean with endless waves. This
is that same boat sinking. I try to eat some food but
everything tastes like metal. I’m sitting on a train
folding bits of metal into small trains, into pieces of
fruit, into other passengers, into wars. I try to sleep
but I’m worried if I close my eyes I’ll end up in the
future. I’m sitting on a train folding myself into
breathing machines, into stairs on the side of a
mountain, into an old song that marks the beginning
of a great journey.

David Wojciechowski is the author of Dreams I Never Told You & Letters I Never Sent (Gold Wake, 2017) and the chapbook Koniec (End) (Greying Ghost, 2023). David is the editor of Postcard and works as a freelance graphic designer. He can be found at davidwojo.com and on Twitter and Instagram @MrWojoRising.

Blue Nguyen

hey siri            what time
is it in vietnam?

how can i tell if my
roommate’s cat is mad at me?
 
            am i gay?
is my family sorry?                 fuck you.
 
write a poem about a girl.      
 
how do i know if i am a lesbian?
 
am i a boy?    
am i a boy?
 
what happened                        to icarus?
why     am      i          so       lonely?
 
search for homes near me.
            what am i,
a boy?
 
                                    do i like girls?
                                    what happens after we die?
 
how can i        ask my             dad
            for more time?
                                                what
            time is             it in                  vietnam?
 
                        i am angry at
            my dad,          
           
how do i ask for                      more
time?
 
hey
                                    siri
is a       girl
who is a           boy
who     likes    girls
a dead              boy?
 
                        how do            i forgive
my dad?                     
 
search
for homes near me.
 
how do
i           translate                      forgiveness
                        into
vietnamese?               
translate         
                        i wish
            we        had      more
time    
into                 
vietnamese.

Blue Nguyen (they/he) (Instagram: @blue.ngu and on Twitter: @queerqhost) is a Vietnamese non-binary lesbian poet and community organizer based out of Boston, MA. They have been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology and Best New Poets Anthology. Their poetry can be found at The Mantle Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Protean Magazine, Prolit Magazine, DEAR Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and more.

Ronnie K. Stephens

SELF PORTRAIT

                  After Candace Williams

As rescued barn cat with six toes. As black dog
chasing mother’s car. As Russian Blue at my feet
through middle school. Through high school. Almost,
almost through college. As weeping in the parking lot
of the vet’s office. As grandfather’s buck knife lying
on a whiskey barrel with father’s watch, heavy
and rusted and calm. As blade dull and chipped.
As first edition of The Bell Jar that still smells
like the night I let a girl read it at the threshold
of her dorm room after too much whiskey and men.
Finally, completely, as the summer I hated myself.
Six inches carved from my own belly with chicken
bones and bicycle spokes. As that other summer
I let shame go and forgave myself everything. As
first time at twenty-four. As no and no and no.
As wait. As eight years later on the drive to work,
the word rape drowning out the morning show
and the punchline and the laughter and the quiet
that always seems to settle over the table after
a funny story. Or a tragic one. As one. And the other.

Ronnie K. Stephens is the author of Universe in the Key of Matryoshka, They Rewrote Themselves Legendary, and The Kaleidoscope Sisters. He joins the many artists calling for a Free Palestine and an end to genocide in every corner of the world.

Morrow Dowdle

If Only They Will See Him

They say that Christ appears among his followers, if only
they will see him. 
                              Was that you, then, always alone
            those Sundays, in the front pew? 
 
If there is anything about our nature, it is what Holy
we miss before our eyes. 
                                  And how could we know it,
            when we’d been blinded so long
 
by beards and long hair, white robes and skin, wings
and golden haloes, our mouths
                                                              holding the sour
            of sanctified identity.
 
Though you cleared your pew like a two-day carcass,
though no one would look you
                                                              in the eye but stare
             hellfire through the back of your head—
 
still, you came and came again.  Congregation rumbled
that you were the bachelor priest’s
                                                                      secret lover, yet they all
             rushed to shake his hand at end of service.

And you, oh, you—clean shaven, bald and spectacled,
lacy bloused and sateen slacked,
                                                      stockinged and pumped—
            somehow the same folks who believed
 
in floods and plagues and miracle healings could not
believe in you. 
                           You, who asked for nothing more
            than to follow along with the rest—
 
to kneel during prayer, to stand during hymn,
to take a man
            into your mouth
             and call it Communion.

Morrow Dowdle has poems published and forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, The Baltimore Review, and Mulberry Literary, among others.  They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  They are the poetry editor for Sunspot Literary Journal.  They live in Hillsborough, NC.

Peggy Heitmann

Old Math

Let me show you how
to count, Alana.
I slide colored beads across
an abacus bar,
begin the lesson,
One and point
to a red wooden marker.
My daughter asks, What
are we counting, Mommy?
Oh, we can count
anything you like:
apples, boxes, kittens.
 
All the while, I count
the number of death
poems I have written
in the last year.
My way of adding
personal stones
for friends and family who
have gone before me.
I am tallying the number
of granite pebbles in my heart.
 
As if she reads my thoughts,
my little girl blurts out,
My grandfather named Earl did die.
She tells me this every day.
Her preoccupation has become mine,
or maybe it is the opposite.
Will you die one day, Mommy?
I cannot answer. I stare
into the future.
 
No matter how I calculate
analytical arithmetic fails
me. I cast all formulas aside
for simple abacus subtraction.
No matter which direction
I slide the beads
they are gone.

Peggy Heitmann has published poems in The Monterey Poetry Review, The Rockford Review, Heron Clan, among others. She considers herself both word and visual artist. Peggy lives in Raleigh, NC area with her husband and two cats.

Shane Allison

Viewers

Instead of bubble butts in khakis,
I get chasers and gainers.
Instead of this boy in the Street Fighter hoodie,
I get Gonzo Bear.
Instead of leather daddies,
I get buzz daddies.
Instead of this one in the pink T-shirt
Dripping with beauty,
I get Wavi Davi.
Instead of John,
I get Bubba.
Instead of Kevin,
I get Kote$.
Instead of Chris,
I get unsolicited unlocked pics of assholes.
Instead of Jerry,
I get meat packers.
Instead of a kiss goodnight,
I get suck me dry.
Instead of Donte,
I get Mile High.
Instead of Derek,
I get Peg Leg Sam.
Instead of Hey, I noticed you from across the room,
I get, Hey, girl.
Instead of Josh, 
I get Jshun.
Instead of Benny, 
I get bad intentions.
Instead of Jamaal,
I get Cracker Barrel Eric.
Instead of Tyler,
I get Freeloader Anthony.
Instead of Grayson,
I get, I want to suck a big cock, and get my ass fucked.
Instead of moonlight kisses,
I get insatiable bottoms and more insatiable bottoms and more insatiable bottoms.
Instead of heart-shaped chocolates,
I get, I love me some BBC.
Instead of, Would you like to go for coffee?
I get, "Please titty-fuck me."
Instead of a hot dad,
I get dick pics in my DM's. 
Instead of bear hugs,
I get open relationships.
Instead of horror movie connoisseurs,
I get dilators in dick holes.

Shane Allison has published four chapbooks of poetry as well as four full-length poetry collections, I Remember (Future Tense Books), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press), Sweet Sweat ( Hysterical Books), and most recently I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire Press). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica, and has written two novels, You're the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon and Schuster Publishing). Shane’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo, Unlikely Stories, Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine, the Southeast Review,  South Broadway Review, Postscript Magazine and a plethora of others. Allison is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there. 

Tas Tobey

Jake

I didn’t step to him the way you would have.
Caught the D train at Atlantic & out of nowhere
dude just lowers his shoulder into me. I mean
just lays right into my chest & rocks me proper
hard like the gap between train & platform edge
was a line of scrimmage he blew thru before
the snap, the steel trickle & click of closing doors
like ringside ropes he straight rushed thru
like a prophecy of violence itching for practice.
I didn’t step to him the way you would have,
the way we used to, the way all our older
brothers taught us the nights they strapped us
to cheap lawn chairs in the side lot & forced warm
racks of discount down our throats until we choked,
blue collar holy water streaming down our faces
as they laughed & talked shit, flinging
their varsity fists into our kidneys & ribs
until we surrendered & squealed
like the thirteen-year-olds we were.
& as I stood on that train staring at this
lanky stick figure sketch storm of a man
all I could think about was the match-lit look in your eye
that night on the T platform back home in Boston
when you, two months shy of seventeen, stood
toe-to-toe with the scariest, meanest drunk I’d seen. 
At least twice our age & half a century heavier,
cracked face stitched with scars & faded ink
he probably had us pegged as perfect marks
but you walked up to him smooth as trick or treat
& smiled at him cold & easy, your blue eyes burning
with a fire I’d never seen as you asked him stone-cold casual
which hospital he wanted to wake up in & I remember
in that moment feeling scared for him & for the first time
scared of you. I watched his eyes twitch & shift
nervously & slowly fall as all the strength seemed
to drain from his body & I had to turn my face
to pull my Sox cap lower over my eyes
so you wouldn’t see me cry.

Tas Tobey is a writer pursuing an MFA in poetry at the City College of New York. His chapbook Rough Cut was selected by Alicia Mountain as the winner of the 2023 Flume Press Chapbook Contest and his poems have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, and The Carson Review. His criticism and journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Complex.

Michaela Mayer

Virginia Litany

what was given, what was taken, appetites slaked—
our thirst for dirt, the soil-sweet smell of rich loam—
to know the name of the people whose land we ate—
land which stretches out before me, green as anything—
unclean, dark crescents under fingernails—
as i burrow fingers beneath what is not mine—
harvest sustenance, roots caressing the earth like slim fingers—
Pamunkey, Chickahominy, Mattaponi—
Rappahannock, Nansemond, Monacan—
consigned to thin allotments of the unwanted—
while i swim through a meditative drone of cicadas—
sudden pleasure of the invading morning glory—
and the fields keening with insect desire—

Michaela Mayer's works have previously appeared in Barren Magazine, Feral Poetry, Olit, Monstering Mag, The Lumiere Review, and others. She has a chapbook out with Fahmidan & Co. Publishing and two cats, Sappho and Sonnet. You can find her on Instagram @mswannmayer55 and Bluesky at eurydicespeaks.bsky.social.

Inkyoo Lee

Confession in an Empty Chapel

Some memories are sacred:
unreachable, visible in the dark.
 
So forgive me for my trembling arms.
 
            We stood by the crossing
as city lights flickered yellow:
comets around a binary star.
 
Yellow was her second-favourite colour
after white. We parted
before the first snow fell—
 
her shrinking silhouette
slowed down the night sky.
 
Some memories are sacred.
I can’t talk about moving on
as if that weren’t a sin.
 
*
 
If there is no love, you must invent one—
 
so sit inside an empty chapel
until the candles trickle down your hands
like a kiss; sit still
until the walls turn space-black
and your breath alone reverberates,
almost like someone else’s.
 
Pray and pray until there’s no God left;
only two sticks of wax on a long wooden bench,
barely alive in each other’s warmth.
 
*
 
I stood by that crossing last night.
 
The sky was still a single bruise
flecked with half-fallen snow—
 
the flakes enveloped me
just as her arms would.
 
This time I couldn’t give it back.

Inkyoo Lee is from South Korea and studies philosophy in the UK. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review, The Shore, Rust & Moth, The Hanok Review, and others. Find out more at https://inkyoolee.wordpress.com/