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TPCReview Issue 002

Noel Wang

message from the year of the horse 2050

here—

we have soft, dirty rains with no respite. we have an island on a continent, farmland wilted across the plains, and highways carved through fields of corn. dry wetlands with no birds sing the silence of warming winter. back when I dreamed of baptizing you in snow, I was still waiting for october. last year, limping back, he said he found another lover.

this november, both the temperature and I are verging on fifty, and though I anticipated the opposite of an asymptote, we, osteoporosis, colorless autumn, and barren land, are converging. and what of you, year of the horse and turning wheel? I dreamed of water, of the antepartum when I was the yellow river. after years of hands rich with wet earth and mouths filled with water, we have exponentiated local topography. the continuum of time and land folded in on itself like waves scraping away the lakeshore. for us, the melted frost was a courtesy for burial.

in hundreds of years, archaeologists, confused by the isotopes in my dry bones, might describe diaspora as a kind of precipitation cycle, where pacific winds rush towards the dark waters of north america and touch true cold for the first time. I remember the bitter taste of the first freeze. back then we thought we knew better, when within winter there was light, and we still called it spring.

Noel Wang is a writer and recent college graduate. Raised in Minnesota, Noel is a Chinese adoptee with Midwestern and Taiwanese-American heritage. She currently studies Mandarin Chinese and teaches math, physics, and English in Taipei.