David Anson Lee
The Night the Horror Film Finished Editing Us
The credits stop.
The screen exhales to black.
But the house refuses the ending.
A stair creaks upstairs:
not loudly,
just enough to insist on memory.
The refrigerator sighs like a tired organ.
The hallway lengthens itself by inches.
You tell yourself:
sound, wiring, settling wood.
You tell yourself:
the movie is over.
But darkness is never finished.
It only changes formats.
Outside, the cul-de-sac tightens into a loop,
a stitched wound seen from above.
Every porch light goes out
as if cued.
Every window forgets reflection.
The dogs fall silent mid-breath.
You stand at the door, listening
not for footsteps,
but for editing.
That quiet sense
something has revised the world
and left you inside the draft.
Psalm for the Glaucoma Witch Who Harvests Lost Sight
The scarecrow has taken my grandmother’s face again.
She stands in the corn where rows forget direction
and moonlight drips like spoiled milk.
All season she has been collecting eyes.
Crow eyes.
Rabbit eyes.
The glass eyes of dolls that learned grief.
Eyes of men who once measured land
as if land were blind.
At dusk she strings them on black thread
between stalk and stalk
a devotional line of witnesses.
The wind moves through them.
They turn.
All of them.
Some blue as frostbite.
Some yellow as old prescriptions.
Some already clouding inward
with their own forgetting.
Grandmother says blindness is not absence:
it is orientation.
She says every field requires surveillance.
She says the soil remembers
what we try to bury in it.
At midnight the eyes open.
Not symbolically.
Organically.
Pupils widening like seeds.
Nerves rooting into dirt.
By morning the corn can see.
And what it sees
has been waiting a very long time
to be recognized.
MRI of the Child Who Returns from Within the Machine Speaking Signals
He enters the tunnel feet first,
a small body consenting to geometry.
The machine closes like a metal thought.
Inside: humming scripture,
magnetic recursion,
a language that refuses vowels.
The technician says: hold still.
As if stillness has ever negotiated with the unknown.
The first images arrive in slices:
clean, obedient, diagnostic.
Then they begin to disagree.
Behind the left orbit: a room.
Inside the room: a door.
Inside the door: standing breath.
Each scan deepens the architecture.
Hallways appear where bone should be.
Footprints fill with liquid light.
Antlers interrupt the white space.
Contrast enters the bloodstream
and everything becomes less metaphorical.
The figure turns.
Acknowledges the lens.
The child inside the scanner smiles
as if recognizing home.
The machine does not stop.
It never stops.
Outside, the parents hold each other
as if containment were possible.
Inside, something ancient completes its exposure
and learns the human face
from the inside out.
David Anson Lee is a poet whose work explores medicine, embodiment, memory, perception, and the uncanny. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plainsongs, New Contrast, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and other literary journals. His first poetry chapbook, The Body Keeps Its Inventory in Shadow, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. He lives and writes in Houston, Texas.