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white butterflies

by Yun-Fei Wang


White moths circle the ceiling light, I mistaken their 

simmers for rain: voiceless palato-alveolar affricate, you like 


huskies and I like you. Special car with extra brakes 

in shotgun, the driving instructor assured me 


he’d save us from crashing, assured me with eyes forking on 

my driver’s-seat legs, and to men like him I smile like 


a cracked, ripen lychee, I look like my mother 

on the Wednesday she found out I like girls, the day meant 


for God’s seed-bearing plants. You grow parsnips and I like

you and I like God. Last night I dreamed I was late to my 


funeral, my driving instructor on the brakes with ash in his 

mouth, half a year earlier, backseat of a different white car, I let 


a woman touch me when she said she’d marry me in 

four years. Somewhere in Boylston my mouth 


rimmed with red wine, raw salmon on the white, fuzzy carpet of my 

best friend’s Newbury dorm. I lay pills out like kibble 


for a big dog and I like you and you look nothing like 

my mother, who once told me to ask her 


if my father has ever been unfaithful, and I bruise another fruit in

my mother’s honor. My friend opens another bottle of white wine 


and I think God created us from the same set of 

ribs. Butterfly shoulders in Chinese refer to girls so thin their 


shoulder bones protrude their backs like wings. The Latin word lux 

made both light and Lucifer, I search for your skin on God’s 


lamppost, then I search for black moths.


 

YF Wang studies at Wellesley College. Her poetry can be found in t’ART, Exist Otherwise, and more.

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