GOHYAH TEA
Travis Chi Wing Lau
[Case notes taken in short hand]
the hawker on the one street
without the name of a dead queen
a purgative in a time of need,
bloody your feet
for a mouthful
of elixir
the color of
a fortune teller’s
nails after she
delivers bad news,
it burns
because for it to work
it must be felt:
in the throat
in the bile
what mothers say
to make a bowl empty
after fires fanned,
backs broken,
black beans
come to cut
the taste
of fat
and ferment—
the taste of a gourd
growing
too bitter
by the last sip.
Travis Chi Wing Lau received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, the history of medicine, medical humanities, and disability studies. Lau has published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Digital Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, as well as venues for public scholarship like Public Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement, Nat. Brut, Matador Review, Impossible Archetype, and Rogue Agent. His chapbook, The Bone Setter, was recently published with Damaged Goods Press.