I think of you with tapeworms in my tummy, like Medusa
had stuck her head through my vagina & at seventeen, Ella
tells me she thinks she might be pregnant—“My mother
is going to kill me”—she says over the bathroom sink, our
skins tattooed by the mirror graffiti. A familiar tune
rings out the Wellesley bells, either Toxic or Phantom of the
Opera, I can’t tell which it is, or perhaps it is neither.
The last time I cried was this morning, but the last time before that
was December 27, 2023, in a blizzard in downtown Toronto
when I heard a stranger talk Taiwanese on the phone & it
was as if my own father had walked through the pine-green doorframe
15 years ago, like my father had he not gone to Beijing and
returned with a broken foot & foreign accent, like what his absence
could’ve been: a phone call in a snowstorm. Ella’s mother
slams her fist on the boy’s door. My mother asks me
if the rumors of me sleeping with my high school counselor
were true. Everyone lies; Toronto freezes on my nineteenth birthday.
Love, there is a snake in the shape of Chinese characters in your
closet, and love, you will have to marry it for your family’s honor.
I bite into two Marlboros remembering my counselor hated
smokers, then I swallow them in hopes of burning the parasites in my
lungs; and I wish I could give Jace my unsunken chest, like
clementines & chewed-up nails, I would’ve given him
my entire limbic system, memories and all. In Founders Hall
I sit myself on the dusty old bookshelves labeled
court evidence, and when my mother tells me my father
has done something terrible to her in the past, I don’t know
if she means infidelity or rape, and I can’t stop thinking about it
when Ella covers my neck bruises with her $40 concealer in the
school bathroom. I beg for my mother’s forgiveness on the way home
from your apartment and she, remembering my father
hated smokers, rolls me into a cigarette, an ashened Marlboro,
before holding me between her two burnt hands for the first time
like she was making a phone call in the middle of a snowstorm.
Mini-interview with YF Wang
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
YW: In the summer of my junior year, I signed up for a one-week writing program at Sarah Lawrence College simply because the program had no selection process. Those five days became the most influential of my writing journey. I discovered a queer, feminist creative writing community that celebrated all forms of expression, something I had never experienced growing up in STEM-dominated spaces. The program gave me the confidence to keep writing, leading me to study at another queer liberal arts college where I continue to pursue creative writing both in and out of the classroom.
HFR: What are you reading?
YW: Realistically, International Relations in the Cyber Age: The Co-Evolution Dilemma (Choucri & Clark 2019) for school. Literarily, Drum Taps by Whitman.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Love, There Is a Snake in Your Closet”?
YW: I wrote this in my brother’s apartment last winter when he was out traveling and I was alone surviving off of sugar cookies and apple cider. Earlier that day I had heard an older man speak Taiwanese into his phone at the apartment lobby, and subsequently realized that I had not heard the language, something my parents spoke often, in the months I had left Taiwan for college. One thought led to another and I wrote the poem about high school and love and hate and cultural heritance and how much I loved the friends I no longer talk to. I wrote the piece in one sitting and never edited it.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
YW: I don’t know. Maybe getting my bachelor’s degree.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
YW: I love Stardew Valley.
YF Wang studies at Wellesley College. Her work can be found in Exist Otherwise, t’ART, Bending Genres, and more.
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Heavy Feather Review 