Solstice, Once
Travis Chi Wing Lau
Over Fire Island
Matt Kish
When the sun stood still, we marked
the occasion by how early the
shadows cut themselves at the knee,
dusk’s daily butchery without rest,
without doubt in its reddening.
A philosophy of quiet:
absence itself preaching loudly to
those who not only see but listen.
The light delivers its sermon,
and you know the way awe arrests me
here by the lapping edges, my own edges
cooling like the limits of belief.
But just as other soles are
perforated by the pavement,
the verses change into a
golden,
golden,
gone.
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, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). Find him online at travisclau.com.
Matt Kish is an artist living in Ohio with his partner and a home full of too many books. He has illustrated books and poems, made comics, made photographs in a darkroom, and filled sketchbooks. He works in ink, paint, and paper and remains strictly analog. Find him on Instagram @matt_kish_art