GARBAGE NIGHT

by J.L. Chen

She comes at eleven through the alley behind the sushi place, and I feel her
breathing before I see her—the rotting-plum night, my window open, my skin open, her fur smelling of motor oil and cedar. They said don't go outside when she comes, but I lie on the warm, oil-slick concrete, nightgowned, and the growl comes from inside both our chests, we're breathing backwards into each other. Tonight she knows, she presses her massive head to my stomach, cubs moving—inside her, inside me—she is swollen, gravid, stitched from moonlight and theft, and I take her smell into my lungs, my mouth, my marrow, her tongue rough against my wrist. I follow her between the recycling bins, the suburbs dissolve, lawns grow backward into forest, we have forgotten her real name but she breathes it into my ear: familial, family, feral. Past the elementary school, through the tennis-court fence, my spine curves, lengthens, under the streetlights we are one animal with too many legs, we hunt through gardens tonight. Tomorrow we wake human again—dirt under our fingernails, plum juice staining our mouths—the neighborhood keeps the secret about wildness, about following her into the space between driveways where the old hunger still lives, patient, bright-eyed, full of teeth.





J.L. Chen's work appears in ARC Poetry, PRISM International, Literary Review of Canada, Tupelo Quarterly, Queen's Quarterly, Grain, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, selected as a Finalist for the 2025 Robert and Adele Schiff Award by The Cincinnati Review, and longlisted for the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize. Chen holds an MFA from University of King's College and is a 2026–2028 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.