you learn to track the tremors of hurt
in passing,
as you urge them to pass in peace
like the sutra reminds
on wooden beads
that you are kin
to these tremors
bound to reverberate again
again
through the scale of a life
now the shape of a town
everyone drives through
but never dirties their soles
because the clay
does not wash off cleanly
once it colors you red
that irritant red
hot with the need
for healing but left throbbing
for more than new blood,
for another tremor
of something more
than hurt again,
than a body mending
before its next sundering
you shake because
you are angry with life.
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 Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [travisclau.com]