Watching Discovery With You In A Foreign Country

The narrator tells us, his voice
calm and quietly fascinated:
                                                there exist
 
in nature certain species of wasps
that stun their prey into submission

for an egg to be lodged           
in the flesh, turning them into mere
incubators –

When the offspring begins
to participate in the cycle, the host
will die –

But until then, the host
lives, its destiny
paralysed against its will.

You see, my love, the venom
isn’t fatal; that is
the intention.

And this waiting
for your return, for the desires to flow
again, is gratitude

for the sting
that turns the living into meat, on which you feed.

 

Dog Lovers

The best breeders
love their dogs to the point of exclusion

of even the slightest possibility of loving
another human: they are at one with their dogs; they cannot tell what is
            worth loving

beyond the merits of their own species
except, perhaps, this potential in the rest: the ease of being manipulated,
            bought over by blind devotion

to the superiority of their breed – Knowing this,
I followed you home. Knowing

what I knew then, I put a leash over
every resistance in my body, put it in a cage;

I pushed the key into your hand, then lay next to you: we spent the night
in the hot stench of dogs

not knowing if the night would outlive either of us
should we bare our teeth and bark.

 

© 2009 Zhuang Yusa

Zhuang Yusa lives in Singapore. His poetry has been published or forthcoming (as Zhuang Yisa) in Sargasso (Puerto Rico), Yuan Yang (Hong Kong), ditch, (Canada), The Toronto Quarterly, Ganymede, The Los Angeles Review, Softblow, Danse Macabre, The Salt River Review, Shampoo and elsewhere. His poetry has also been anthologized in Ganymede Poets Vol. One (Ganymede Books, 2009) and Smoke (Poets Wear Prada, 2009).