Reprinted from PRINTS  2ND SATURDAY POETS ANTHOLOGY

It’s just days from a new year—me, a golden dragon two years late, and she still learning what it means to be a dog—and we’re greeted with relentless, lingering stares, without the hint of a smile, without a trace of acceptance of this coupling. People stare in her country far longer than in mine, but even she doesn’t know what to make of this. She’s a quarter Chinese herself, from an Asian nation with the similar percentage of ethnic Chinese citizens, yet I feel in her tensing arm that she’s searching her English vocabulary for the word inscrutable.

Even cars, she notes, are afraid of people here. We begin to appreciate it when we are shoved aside in someone’s hurry, since even though there is nothing resembling an excuse me anywhere in the swallowed syllables we hear, we are assured, at least, that this treatment is impersonal. To be forgotten here is our safest course. It’s not the first time I’ve been Shanghaied, but I’ve never been here before.

I brought her here to see snow, but we haven’t found any. And it was all my idea, I thought at first. Then I realized it was hers—subtle hints, puppeteer manipulations—and that was fine because our own small game was small, was game, though to us it seemed huge and earnest, us twinned suns, our path defined by our struggles with each other’s momentum and mass; but now, carelessly conscripted to some unknown battle, how can we appear as more significant than two flames unable to escape the same dwindling fire, an accident in fractals, a fleeting illusion of a two-headed beast emerging from a half-spent match? And I see us, as through an overhead

camera, slowly zooming out to reveal more and more of this city, this endless country, the South China Sea, the mountains, the thousands of miles of railway, the thousands of miles of wall, the millions of paths, the billion black specks, and in this souring view I can’t distinguish myself from what clings to me, from the others, from the neon, from the cold: I see that I am itself this road, destination and journey. I am these lives, these noble gaseous colors, excited, whipped to a thick pulp like the glowing flesh of a firefly, applied in a short, bold stroke. An irradiated artery, a splotch of soul, like the bacteria-laden phlegm spit onto the cement in this shared influenza.

Where are we going? she whispers in my ear: exposed, insensitive to the fur of her parka.

She tugs, repeats the question, calls a name, repeats that, tugs again. I look at her, an inconstant shape, wrinkle my bloodless brow,