Hair removal rarely gets a poem, but Jordan Lee-Tung and Evan Moore give it three stanzas and let it grow into something close to a ritual. "Encounters II" follows a body through a sequence: the rough work of clearing the skin, the sting and comfort that come after, and finally a stillness in which the finished skin is admired. Its central idea is that discomfort and tenderness can sit side by side, and that an ordinary grooming routine can become an act of reverence.
The first stanza reads like shorthand. "The shape / The neck nape" has no verb at all, as if someone were sizing up a surface before starting work. The rhyme of "shape," "nape" and "tape" is short and hard-edged, and "tape" lands exactly where the rip would. "Uproot with tape" is the stanza's only real action, phrased like an instruction. The imagery is botanical. The neck becomes a "tree trunk" and the hairs become "bristled thistles," so the body is a plot of ground and the hair a weed. The line "Tree trunk grown bristled thistles" is also deliberately clotted, with three words piled up and no smooth path through them. The syntax is as prickly as the thing it describes.
The second stanza turns on a contrast. "Shave clean" is another command, and "Burning alcohol" supplies the sting, though the phrase could be an antiseptic or a drink, and the poem doesn't choose. Then comes "Soothing lips," and the mood changes. The last line, "Soothing lips run from shoulder blade to base," is the longest so far, and it travels the way the lips do, down the back. The poem never says "I" or "you," but the phrasing suggests the lips belong to someone other than the person being groomed. That would explain the title: the routine has become an encounter between two people. Burning and soothing sit one line apart, and the poem treats them as parts of the same attention.
The third stanza is the longest, at seven lines, and it slows everything down. "Solemn breath / Serene moonglow" is full of soft s sounds, a hush after the plosives of "tape" and "shape." The skin is "smooth," the room is "temperate," and there is "Not one goosebump." That last detail can be read as ease, a body so relaxed it doesn't flinch. It can also be read as eerie stillness, skin as unreactive as marble. The poem lets both readings stand. Then the ending widens the frame: "Where flesh is canvas / Painted by stars and tanned by shadows." Light becomes pigment, and "tanned by shadows" is a pleasing paradox, since tanning belongs to sun and here darkness does the work. The room turns into a sky. The poem has moved from earth, with its trunk and thistles, to the heavens, with its stars and moonglow.
The form follows the same path. The stanzas run four, three and seven lines, and the rhyme that is so firm in the first stanza loosens and disappears. The poem relaxes as the body does. The numeral in the title suggests a place in a larger sequence, though this text alone shows only one moment of it. Two names are credited, yet the poem keeps one continuous, quiet voice, and it never explains itself.
What makes it worth reading is how much it asks of a small subject. It doesn't hide the unglamorous part, and it keeps "uproot" and "burning" in the poem rather than skipping straight to the moonlight. But it also refuses to treat grooming as merely mechanical. By the end the same skin that was weeded like a garden is described as a canvas under stars. The poem suggests that care often begins with something a little painful and that the result can be beautiful. It also leaves a faint question about whether that final calm is trust or only silence.