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Gone Lawn 56
sturgeon moon, 2024

Featured artwork, Untitled, by Abbie Doll

new works

Ming Wei Yeoh

Bull Face


I know a girl with eyes set wide like a bull's or Halle Bailey’s. Her skull is smaller than the nickel in my palm, with half a soybean in place of Jefferson’s face. She makes a deposit every Tuesday in a dress that bells like concrete—never over a hundred, repair season, she says, though I’ve already decided I’ll kiss her cheeks in the two-story palace down the block and tell her she’s a strawberry the circumference of my fingernail; I’ll soothe her needle-hole pores with mine. At the bank teller window, I ask her when and where she was born and she tunnels me to a Nebraska trailer park where the only visitor was a circus troupe looking for a girl with an animal face, if only she’d had the nerve to learn some tricks and her mother weren’t so diabetic. She tells it sadly, and I assure her a swan isn’t a bird, more like a slender white child. She says just look at me and pinches the rib-sheath on her side, and I should stroke it but I want to gnaw it like chicken skin. So I ask if her body sheds as latex, though women like her typically claim a cotton blend. She says it shrinks in the wash, with a sigh, making me curl Jefferson in my fist and say I’d do anything to become the crushed ants on your sneaker sole. She blushes translucent and curls jam-fingers over my knuckles that choke on her pennies. But I point to the plum on my face and say if your mother ate this I’d cure her. It’s 5 PM and the bank is about to close.


Ming Wei Yeoh is a writer from Minnesota. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, a national Scholastic medalist, a 2024 YoungArts Winner with Distinction, and a 2024 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Her work has been featured in Bending Genres, Bright Flash Lit, The Apprentice Writer and more. She is a rising first-year at Harvard College.