David Anson Lee

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

We keep a ledger of small losses: one slipper at the pier, two gull nests, ten breaths of air no one thought to save. The ledger rides in the pocket of a coat that remembers salt: buttons looped with a child’s braid, a coin pressed thin as a fossil.

Once a year we walk the shoreline and record what the tide returns: a plastic comb, a glass bead, a photograph of a town no longer printed on any map. We bury each entry in a jar and plant a willow above it.

The willow grows as though sounding the names aloud.

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

They said our town still had a forest, though it clung to the highway like a frayed sleeve. At dawn the trucks came, counting trunks the way bankers count coins, and left behind a geometry of stumps the birds could not decipher. The library taped a notice to its glass: “Community Meeting. Seeds Needed.” Women arrived with seed packets folded like blessings. Children wrote tree names on scraps of paper, as if naming could mend the thinning air. We planted where runoff carved salt into the soil and hoped the roots could read our intentions.

dawn over drainage:
someone scatters sunflower seed
as if feeding stars

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

When the last map burned,
we traced new roads from thumbprints:
salt in the seams,
a country stitched by small hands.

A child learns the coast
by listening for gulls;
an older woman counts orchards
the way she once counted prayers.

Every mouth carries a river’s memory:
names of fish, the taste of rain.
We lift the globe like a bowl,
tilt it until teaspoons of light
slide into the cracked places
and teach the wounds
how to flower.