Assistant Editor Lisa Low: Anni Liu’s “On Injury” begins with a relatable dilemma: needing to use the bathroom during a movie. As the text notches inward through the use of indentations, mimicking a scaffold, the boundary between inside and outside—of the movie frame, the theater, the body itself—starts to break down and become porous. Through this reframing, the embodied act of watching a film turns into a nuanced meditation on connectedness and pain.
To hear Anni read her piece, click below:
On Injury
For most of the movie,
I had been aware of my need to urinate but even more aware of the entire row of people’s laps I’d have to crab-leg across to do so, so I stayed in my seat, putting other people’s imagined discomfort ahead of my own bodily functions,
but I also didn’t want to miss any portion of the movie that I was so eager to see, which was turning out to be a good one despite the fact that I had managed to hurt my wrist right before, while sporting with friends, knowing only the vaguest things about stopping the white ball when it came in my direction with, of all things, my forearms, and the wrist was swollen hot and bright pink (anyone else might have stopped playing until several more hours’ worth of instructional YouTube videos had been viewed), which meant it would throb every so often—like when I shifted in my seat to get a clearer view—and kept me from holding hands with Y, which we often do when we watch movies, an act that helps someone like me with an overactive imagination to stay rooted to this life in this body,
so when the movie was over and the lights went up, I rushed downstairs to the bathroom and, having relieved myself, came back to find everyone dispersing into the cold evening (I love that feeling of emerging from a theater and into the now-dark day, as if what we’d seen made it so), and we said our farewells to the friends who’d sat beside us for the last two hours and with whom we now shared the lives of those depicted on-screen: the light on the actors’ faces from the porch as they looked up into their night sky empty of the fireworks they could hear but not see, the crunch of korokke deep-fried to perfection in their mouths, the final wrenching separation of the ad hoc but very real family,
after which Y and I walked back to the car and I said something I didn’t quite mean like how sad and then tears that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding were there, hot on my face, reminding me how strange weeping can be, how one injury becomes connected with others and in our bodies can be metabolized, then released together, how witnessing fictive pain can activate our own dormant sensitivities—and now, two weeks later, the bruise I knew was there from the ball hitting my wrist has finally surfaced from the deeper tissue, as if it will eventually float up and through my skin into the air.
Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea, 2022), winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. You can find her poems and translations featured most recently in Ploughshares, Ecotone, Columbia Journal, the Georgia Review, and Two Lines. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, edits at Graywolf Press, and is working on a hybrid essay/poetry collection about parole. See more at her website.
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