Calling the dead
On certain nights they come back,
ghost story fragments lodged in my head
from midnight taxi rides. Almost always
a woman in a red dress, hollow laughter
and a ball bouncing in a playground,
lost souls crossing the misty river where Meng
offers them soup to forget, before their next life.
And those afternoons when my mind would spin
with ominous tales, each school in Hong Kong
a graveyard. We begged for our turn
to go to the loo together, believed ghostly hands
would sprout from faucets to bring us back
to a wartime colony where Japanese soldiers
raced with each other to slash more heads.
The girl from my class kept a scrapbook
of ghost stories: I learnt that vampires
in Qing dynasty robes don't hop sideways;
some actors never came back from film shoots
and careless children disappear with each UFO.
We huddled around a quivering soy sauce dish
to see it move through the Ouija board. It's be hard to
make dish spirits leave. And other myths of the land
of the missing; my first friend in high school,
our birthdays a day apart, used to show me
her palm lines, one line shorter than the rest.
What do you think of the place where you are now?
Will we be friends in our next lives?
Copyright Credit: Jennifer Wong, "Calling the dead" from Letters Home. Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Wong. Reprinted by permission of Nine Arches Press.
Source: Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020)