Every Fig Has a Wasp Inside

What do you do with the things that made you—when they also tried to unmake you?

In Every Fig Has a Wasp Inside, Tian Sanchez-Ballado excavates the body—queer, CubaRican, Southern, chronically ill—and asks what it means to carry what cuts and feeds you in the same breath.

These poems are not an exorcism. They are what happens when the haunting stays.

Here: Wasps dissolve into figs. Lunchables erase pastelitos. Insurance companies feast on your bones. What devours you becomes sweetness.

This isn't a coming-of-age story.
It's what survival looks like when it lingers.
Not confession—canon.
Not healing—staying.

Like the fig that needs the wasp's body to fruit, these poems know:
That tenderness has teeth.
That inheritance is both wound and offering.
That sometimes, the sweetest thing you can do is refuse to be digested.

With precision, dark humor, and unexpected grace, Sanchez-Ballado writes like someone gutting memory for seeds—finding against all odds, what stays sweet.