Two fingers can turn
with ease to violence:

some things must not be
permitted to grow,

so I weed with the white lie
of remorse

the limp strands
that a woman who traded

her worn schoolbooks for refuge only
to grey in entrapment

has said means I was touched by fire
and so will be

cold to the touch,
brightest before

slow death and joining the rest of
them,

those whose brows and eyes
are too ashen now to be even told apart.

I pay my respects by hand, quick in
the manner they left us

so that what remains is the
fear we never manage to sweep away.

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]

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