Thrush Poetry Journal
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David Dodd Lee
​

Half A Century Poem
 
Have I ever told you about my grandfather
 
How nights with a drink in his hand
 
He’d sit at a desk and look out at all the used cars
 
His one kidney failing (that’s all God gave him)
 
My bed has been dark and slow all week
 
My eyes in a kind of reserve
 
You might dig your hand down inside there and find blood near the roots
 
One inch to the left and the $500 slab of Carrara marble cracks
 
Close to his spine, my grandfather’s
 
Rain on the windshields and asphalt
 
And the street lights in winter that he claimed calmed him so much





Inventory

                                   (for Arthur Vogelsang)


reading Arthur's Left Wing of a Bird

when a plane stops in the sky


in neighborhoods bordering
inland lakes they call these flying dreams . . .

you might be watching a bead of her sweat from your Adirondack chair

studying for theology class
 
or say the bodies keep piling up

dark clouds of gnats swarming over the boiling inlets . . .

an empty noose swings in the breeze near the abandoned fish hatchery

wings on the pterodactyl fall right off in the moonlight

the eyes on a pig flow imperceptibly inward

the dead fish in the ponds begin eating the shadows of all the other dead fish

that's when a branch snaps you in the face

the plane in the sky begins breaking in half



 
David Dodd Lee is the author of nine full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction in Willow Springs, New World Writing, Sou’wester, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. He is also a painter and a collage artist. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Permafrost, The Hunger, Pinball, & Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, photographs, new original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in late 2020. 

 


Return to September 2020 Edition