The Last Sunday
The hymnal’s open to a page I’ve memorized for twenty years,
the words still fit my mouth
but not the cavity behind my sternum anymore,
light comes through the window like it always has,
indifferent and gold,
and I sit with my hands in my lap like two small animals gone cold.
The pew is oak and hard, the way they built them hard on purpose,
to remind the body what the spirit costs,
to make devotion surface
through discomfort into something they could call transcendence,
but all I feel is wood against my spine and the slow condensed
weight of a decision I’ve been carrying since before I could name it,
a thing I fed and watered and tried weekly to contain it.
This is the last Sunday I will sit in borrowed light,
the last time I’ll hold the hymnal like a weapon in a fight
I was never really winning, in a war I didn’t start,
the last time I’ll let the organ fill the hollow in my heart
with noise that sounds like comfort from the outside looking in,
the last time I’ll ask forgiveness
for the act of living in my skin.
And the door swings shut behind me, and I don’t go back,
and the light follows me out anyway.