On the Night of My Collapse

The lip
    of the glass
           sang
           before I
                  dropped it
I hadn’t known
         red
         to have a sound
                a piercing

of two cries
                 entangled in
       fractures
       drawing
   more than blood

now pooling like dark
    in my eyes
    that give way to
    vertigo

when forearms undo
              gravity
     holding
     me in
        abeyance
        in
        lines that
        smooth
             toward
             the crooked

and I suddenly have
         no backbone

   limp joy as the
   pain lifts
   with your straightened
                      legs

crumpled as I am
       with the vapors
            rising
            to an occasion
                    of care

uncertain
  like all future
             good

Travis Chi Wing Lau is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, health humanities, and disability studies. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement and in a forthcoming chapbook, Paring (Finishing Line Press).