Selected Poetry by David Anson Lee

Photo Source: Unsplash

Vacancy

The motel sign blinked VAC NCY

where the missing A

had surrendered years ago

to wind.

Inside Room 12,

a traveling saxophone player

soaked his swollen feet in ice water

while an old sitcom laughed through static.

The wallpaper peeled

like sunburned skin.

Outside, trucks drifted along Interstate 40

all night long:

great mechanical whales

crossing the dark American desert.

At two in the morning

he stepped outside to smoke.

The ice machine hummed beside him

like an exhausted refrigerator

in a farmhouse kitchen.

Far off, lightning flickered silently

above the plains.

For reasons he could not explain,

he suddenly thought of his mother

washing peaches in a metal sink

forty years earlier.

How she hummed Patsy Cline

without knowing she was lonely.

How loneliness sometimes waits decades

before entering the room.

A moth battered itself

against the motel light.

Then stopped.

Then fell.

The saxophone player watched it there

on the cracked concrete

beside his boots,

small as a prayer

that lost its way

yet somehow still arrived.

Snow at the Reservation Clinic

The snow began before dawn.

By seven

the reservation roads disappeared completely,

fences dissolving into white distance.

Inside the clinic

boots melted into muddy pools

beneath plastic chairs.

An old rancher waited beside

a teenage mother and sleeping infant.

A Lakota hymn played softly

from someone’s cellphone speaker

near the reception desk.

The young doctor from Minneapolis

looked terrified of the storm.

The receptionist laughed kindly

and handed him coffee

.

Outside, wind erased tire tracks

as quickly as memory.

Near noon

the power flickered once,

twice,

then steadied.

Everyone in the waiting room

looked upward together

without speaking.

For one suspended moment

the entire building felt alive:

the coughing child,

the rancher rubbing arthritic hands,

the exhausted nurse charting blood pressures,

the drifting snow against the windows.

A community held briefly together

by weather,

fear,

coffee,

fluorescent light,

and hope.

By evening the storm moved east.

Cars started.

People disappeared homeward.

But long after the parking lot emptied,

snow continued falling softly

through the reservation dark

like ashes from an invisible fire

the whole world

was trying to keep alive.

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He double majored in philosophy and medical science at Boston University; and has been published in numerous literary journals including Right Hand Pointing, Braided Way, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Silver Birch Press, The Orchards, Mouthful of Salt, and Spillwords. He lives in Texas.