NESTING

By Taylor Fang


In autumn, my mother and I look up to the sky and search for birds. In Chinese culture, magpies symbolize good luck. I can imagine my mother on her first day in Utah, craning her neck to follow arcs of flight. I like to imagine she saw magpies that first day: a parliament of birds lopping off the sky, sleek bodies spearing the clouds. But maybe she saw crows, a bad omen. After all, our then-nearly-100-year-old neighbor, Maxine, fed potatoes to crows in her backyard. Maybe crows weren’t so bad, since we loved Maxine. We called her my mom’s “American mother.” So now, when I step outside, I look for magpies and crows both, their wings dappled against a gray Utah sky.


Taylor Fang, a graduate of Logan High School, served as the 2019-20 National Student Poet of the West. Her writing has been published by the Pulitzer Center, as well as The New York Times and MIT Tech Review. She’s currently attending Harvard, interested in studying English and statistics. In her free time, Taylor enjoys reading, hiking and making zines. She can be found at taylorfang.weebly.com.