Welcome back for Zoeglossia’s Poem of the Week Series, curated this month by Kenny Fries, award-winning author of In the Province of the Gods.
Epistle to Copy of a Kouros
By Travis Chi Wing Lau
In hand and foot and mind
alike foursquare fashioned
without flaw,
your fragile youth,
Dolomitic, though
soft in gaze, for
you are what others
see upon you,
you are what others
want to see,
even when kalos
erodes.
In your peak bloom, I am to
mourn for you,
beautiful
in your noble
undeath,
but I can only see
the naked
truth:
how anatomy is
politics,
how you are cursed
to stand
for a cruel beauty
that can only
love one form
as it imposes upon
others.
But you have been
betrayed
by the hand of
your maker,
for you bear his
traces on your skin:
the kleos of joints
refusing,
the shake of a
body beginning not
to own itself,
the silent pain that
finds expression in your
blankness of face.
A black and white photograph of a nude Chinese American gay man with black hair and freckles. He is not wearing glasses but has on two black diamond-shaped earrings.
Travis Chi Wing Lau is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, Foglifter, Rogue Agent, and in 2 chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020, forthcoming)
Learn more at his website.