YL XUE

The Dog

Interiority is a gift, the dog trainer says, waving a
clutch biscuit in front of Tucker. Positive reinforcement,
clicker training, is as much about training you as training
your companion animal…DH names what we wish pets solved:
loneliness, fear of betrayal, lasting intimacy….B says
he hates pets, the domesticated animal a narcissistic
projection of the consumer’s inner vacuity, re: Nylabones and
extruded beef product. Our intimacy is different, I
whisper to E, we have so much! Banging against one
another, the rattle of consciousness, grief, tenderness,
and distance! Forgive! You have to click at the zenith,
when Tucker leaps, tongue hanging, on air in the last second
like Jordan. Just like Jordan.

Sonnet (*)

The wind blows all the recycling across the block,
collectivized asphalt. Cities are
grids. Grids reconstitute. Leaves mound, as do trucks,
cement rollers, safety cones. The thing
we need for ourselves is always freedom; for others,
providentially less. Endless weather somehow implicating
endless volatility. E says embryogenesis difficult across
recently evolutionarily divergent populations.

Perhaps especially under stress, force majeure?

I show her a card from a Chinese friend: every day,
we ascend. Among my terrors I number: not having thought
enough. The same hasty coarse green barfs desert yuccas, dog shit,
and sleek succulants along the eroded staircases of Bernal
Heights, conchoidal in the breakages. There are always causes
for self doubt, I assured her, always improvements in reproductive technology.

A Riddle Before Bats

I dream walking down to the Flat House
Two brick dorms stolid a side, a row of
single rooms cubed grudging us in. Dirty
Wang Ming looses a piece of vein, beef
she chucks up, thick in my mouth. Mother’s
flat fish grows pan eyes. Every eye sees
the belly’s split. Fan-dancing mother chews, leaves
in my mouth. So out and of gloom, Emily sucks
in Blue Dream, puffs in my mouth.

The mouth of the Flat House
Is a gate.
Steel, thick, like Cotton Mather’s gate.
I open my mouth, say to E, mind the row, let’s to — Cotton Mather’s
boat house. At the boat we row
to the mouth, the Charles entering the sea, which
does no toke, and fed one or two or omega or three: the waters they fleece and rumple us.

Dream, Argument

The glass of California summer breaks into quarters
and then they break open
for slots; the dog grows brown spots under her pink skin.
I see sprites before my eye, a bloom of yeast,
white.

If Emily belonged to me, I would belong to the bats.
Mother caught a bat in our one room, a fur glove in a white web/net.

“Disturbed from attics, roosts, natural habitats
bats are agents of disease or biological vectors: rabies, hepatitis, hemmorhagic fever.”

The closer we are in Linnean classification
(a system of sexual demarcation)
the greater the edge-probability of infection.
(in systems of sexual demarcation)
The problem is belonging, not how we are to each other.

I am avoiding the question

The dog gets between us on the bed.
I am too contentious.
Do I know how to drive carefully?

YL Xue lives in NYC with the dog Poopy Xue and received a Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholarship to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2019.