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.

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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/