Church Party

Jeffrey Winter


 

I suppose my father, standing
at the window over the sink, saw
beams of light in the black woods
out back and came to tell my
mother—

I lay in bed that Sunday night,
evolving plots to keep me home
the following day, and I thought I
heard my father say church party
shortly before I fell asleep.

This is the moment I come back to,
the place I want to live:
in bed on the Sunday night before
I arrived at school to find your desk empty,
wondering what such a party would entail,

picturing pews cracking under the bottoms
of hefty revelers, their hymnals open
to the secret secular songs
that had been hidden from our eyes
just that morning

as we sat together in church,
you and I,
so very, very happy and so bored.