Ruth Williams

Sisters, We must Hold the Water in Our Mouths

Grandma never went in for the pastor's charge
for purity, having loved Grandpa

past his philandering. In the pallet factory 
where they met, the greatest erotic act

was when a man removed splinters
from a woman's hands, then washed her fingers

with a rag pulled and wrung 
from a bucket of clean, clear water.

A biblical scene among the factory machines.
It wasn't until later my sisters and I learned 

a woman washes herself for a man, 
not the other way 'round.

His hands on her body, we'd been told,
were a way of bringing impurities to the surface

like an old-fashioned photographic image,
shapes rising slowly as the film

lay exposed in the acid bath.
The youth pastor warns us to hold fast,

hands out a chart upon which we trace 
our fingers down the increasing heat of body parts:

hair, eyes, lips, breasts, something we can't name 
as anything other than South.

Graced by a man's hands, the pastor says,
we'll be marked, traces scarring the picture.

But, I choose my loyalties. 
The tender ministry of a man's hands.

After all, Grandma said, you have to spit on it
to make it shine.

Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence, 2018), and two chapbooks, Nursewifery (Jacar, 2019) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl, 2012). Find her online at ruthcwilliams.com.