Nanjing 1937-38

            after Iris Chang
 
 
 
I keep reliving
her own
World War
Two traumas.
In which the name of a
popular band references
the prostitution sector
of a Nazi camp,
and the singer
commits suicide before
their first American tour.
Joy Division, indeed.
In which the writer of a book
with a child of her own
writes about the way the Japanese
made hookers of children
and conducted live experiments
on the childless that they
made child-less,
& she is harassed
night after night after night
for months & years
until people with something
to hide have remade her ears
& her eyes into another site of atrocity
& she takes her own life
& while the funeral
is held in Cupertino,
across the world a memorial
for victims of the massacre
make for her, a statue
and a cupid’s wing.
Her child is two.
 
 
 

Stella Yin-Yin Wong is a first-generation immigrant and a Chinese-American poet in the M.F.A program at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She grew up in New York City, studied for fifteen years as a classically trained concert pianist, and received her English BA from Harvard with a minor in Global Health and Health Policy. She is the winner of the 2018 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Danez Smith, and the 2016 Academy of American Poets University Prize. Wong was a recipient of a fellowship from the POETRY Foundation Incubator. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Brooklyn Poets, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and the LA Review of Books.