The Book of Ruth
by Marti Wong
Ruth woke with something hot in her ribcage. Shrike
at the window, talons sharp as glass. Thin, silvery birdsong
pecked at her nerves. Naomi had filled her with fever.
Put your left ear to the window: that’s plenitude. For years
they were friends. They stood in the blue-tiled kitchen, aimless,
almost free, as accidental as minutes. They cooked
with cardamom and margarine, steam rising in billows
from pans on the paraffin stove. Every night they talked by the
windowsill, pressing tin cups of tea to each other’s faces.
Every night a pale hand unfolded from the moon’s smudgy fog,
and Ruth would go out into the garden to feed it. They walked
in shadowless light, time double-dutching in silky rings
around their bodies. They hid between lacy dogwoods while
the wind blew their skirts against their legs. In the morning
Ruth would make Naomi sing from the small of her back
to the tips of her fingers, strumming her rib bones with lovely hands.
She kept on wanting, wanting promise, wanting entrance. Wanting
to climb into her locked mind and unspool it herself. Naomi wanted a Word.
She called it redemption, the sea tumbling the bones. In Ruth
she saw some erratic switch, wild and flickering like silver grass.
Do you think yourself good? In Ruth she saw worlds turning,
pale fires burning off. She saw a threshing floor swept clean
of dirt, three sets of white wings fanning out at its center like lily leaves,
each wing given a measure of seven sins to play with.
Just look, Ruth insisted, at everything. That’s our Word.
You with your fantasies. You with your fears. So difficult a woman.
And again: spread your wings over your servant. You’re the redeemer.
Stop that. Did you love? Yes. Liar. You’re touching your throat.
That’s not my tell. I’m devoted — so there. But not in love.
Naomi undid the slipknot at the back of her apron, the ribbon
between her skull and neck. Wash that streaky face. Put on perfume and
your best clothes. Then go. Ruth held her wrist like it might run away.
Can’t see you anymore. Naomi went silent. Streaks of red slithered
across the roiling sky. Are you still there? She slid her hands into her pockets.
Consider it an exercise in restraint.
Pray for Rain
by Marti Wong
At five-thirty the rains tremble and begin.
The beachcombers clear off; we set out plates
of figs and some salty confusion of half-cooked meat.
I’ve left the table, the warm, white house, to write
to you. To keep a different ghost away. I want to hear
your southern-rain stories: mudflats at nightfall,
hills stained with copper sulfate, water meadows
soaking wet. Units of time unroll in walnut-red slats,
stiff as jaws. The false collective of present tense:
every evening you take your bike to the hills
to watch the damselflies release their fog of rapture,
to see birds lost in orbit. It’s all written in letters and stamps:
the centerless buzz of earthflax, right and wrong
like timepools. Your words are footholds of the past, cold
and crucial with their slippery, palliative pour.
The sun licks its last streaks over the swollen, silver sky,
snatches of light scattering along the headland like tar-smoke.
The wind starts to fall and drag, a train whistle mourning
in the distance. I watch the big cherry tree jab its polished
fingers into the seething storm, the hems of wavebreak
lapping at the sandsill like wet, white tongues. Still
this wrongness of hours, of what they try to contain.
The Kiss of St. Francis
by Marti Wong
It is winter again, white flecks of snow
ticking across the fields like lice.
We’ve brought it with us, the moorland wet flow
of empty rains, the sob of a petrol tank
as it smokes over, leaving its white paper trails
across the wooden sky. Every morning
the sun tongues my eyes open: I peel
the sticky tangle of bedsheets from my limbs
and suddenly I am free. Dawn unrolls its silver fog
down your back, the stumps of your spine protruding
like teeth. You press the heat of a porcelain
cup to your mouth and then to your cheeks, the backs
of your knuckles red and gnarled like pomegranates.
So many fragile things. Between us, a grass basket
of lemons and eggs, a matchbox full of shells and sea-glass,
the self-swallowing bloom of smoke.
I want to ask if your ghosts touch their cold fingers
to each other's backs like this, to remind themselves
what it is to be flesh, to be necessary. We build a fortress
out of linens and old wicker chairs, dancing between states
of advanced intoxication as we read about cold tea blues
and shipbuilding in Beirut, about bright red horses
with braided manes and ivory tails. The wind
has claimed a body of its own, sweet and brazen and
slow. Sunlight flocks over the fields outside, hollowing out
our heavy bones. Not like last year, when we finagled our way
into monasteries and lazar houses, artless
and indifferent. We hid in a cave near San Damiano
for about a month, drunk on mountain water and
wild with hope. Not like that night on the domed roof
of the Greek cathedral, clinging like hell
to the icy stained-glass panels. You wore
your sheer tulip dress, its skirt limp
over your spidery legs: blue dragonfly
under a cold shard of moon.
Marti Wong is a 15 year old student living in Brooklyn, New York. She can be found listening to The Raincoats, scouring her dad's library, or reciting the incomplete history of Virginia Woolf's life. She loves Anne Carson, Carolyn Forchè, and Jorie Graham.