SAVIOR COMPLEX — ASHLEY WANG
/It started with the minor things in life, symptoms steeped until lethal. Meaning my preschool teachers taught me well when they said to pray and reach for the bones embedded in the spines of our coloring books, to begin as a list of things to rescue:
we’re sitting in 2008 and mother says fireflies are stars trying to escape infernos. Once confronted with their own mortality, they fled, chose abandonment as a solution to the finish line. So I stand on the porch, correct this injustice. Launch a mission of grabbing onto wings, spilling mason jars and a minefield of paper cups over the fence. For months, constellations descend into our driveway, wake up on top of a kitchen island. I regurgitate Bible lessons, spit out a version of the Good Samaritan; cook up Turbo Rocket popsicles from the ice-cream truck, opening each summer day with resurrection. I chart lives by the week, feed the fireflies into believing. Always toward the same end:
after graduating from guerilla prayers on curbsides and metal subway seats, the Sunday youth group flies to Chiang Rai. We write ourselves into a feel-good testimony, give too little and take too much. Cheap chocolate, fiction by the spoonful. Yes. Eve ate the seed of a fruit, grew it in her womb. And God sent Santa to save us all. Teach card games, as if losing a mother prevents a girl from counting to thirteen. As if knowing how to spot royalty will story a path out of an opium field. Once, before dinner, I explain how hunger humbles the soul, shortens the journey to salvation. Five minutes later, we devour pork, let oil coagulate with the sweat holding fast onto our chins. We slaughter a pig and watch its head fling open like a trapdoor. Witness a man hold the quivering flesh, unable to dictate its end, long enough for its skin to boil over with flies. Swallow a fly. Preach forgiveness and the right way to play tag: relentless, the way satellites chase after cars at midnight. We forget to consider the possibility of failed metaphors, that words sometimes struggle to cross the boundary between hunter and hunted. Forget translation—
fool them into stitching together lightning bolts, igniting back into the fires they ran from. A hundred charity cases marked as bruises on the countertop.
Ashley Wang lives in Lawrenceville, NJ. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Sine Theta Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Polyphony Lit, Plum Recruit Mag, Freezeray Poetry, and elsewhere. She tweets occasionally @AshWang20.
