Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later

Abstract

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) Keywords Travis Chi Wing Lau, poem Dorsality When I let him touchthe small of my backfor the first time, I thought a finwould erupt forth— to ground mewhile I learned to breathe in new waters,this first and sacred time when I was becomingsomething else entirely too slick,for the flesh I know must stay in motionor risk never moving again. [End Page 743] Reencountered, Months Later i saw you when he sought care beside meat the clinic that always runs hours behind one where more men go than comeout of impatience to court some other urgencythat feels better than a test of blood you were there in the same shirt I took offand did not bother to look me dead in the eyes you claimed were littlebitter almonds that knew more than they should because the last thing you did was hurry toescort me down the hard stairs that would break no fall after I relented and realizedthe cold of it the cold of you a persistence that gets to claim innocencewhere the no never comes only the yes skips in the recording offering but theshallowest relief of a rehearsal we both do [End Page 744] that leaves a collision of two less slipperythan it in fact always already was as I walked out of your brownstonei bathed in the coolness of former heat slowly buffeted by what i could not seeyet knew encircled me the beginning of a familiarsiege [End Page 745] Travis Chi Wing Lau travis chi wing lau (he/him/his) is assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press), Paring (Finishing Line Press), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.