five poems

by David Lee

Archive of Horses

The horses arrive at 3 a.m.,
manes braided with leftover thunder,
nostrils flaring sparks
the street refuses to swallow.

I lean out the window:
glass cracked by early light;
and they bolt across the horizon,
hooves scrawling runes into the sky
like lipstick abandoned on porcelain.

Someone once said sorrow
is a horse without reins.
Tonight I see them clearly:
limping, feral, unafraid;
writing prophecies
on pavement that will not remember
my name.

Dressed in Shadow

She enters like a thought
that forgot to ask permission,
dressed in shadow,
neon veins pulsing beneath her ribs.

The room hums:
low voltage,
secrets snarled in the curtains.
Outside, electricity plays tag
with gutter water,
each raindrop splitting her silhouette
into misaligned stars.

She tilts her head:
midnight flexing in her bones;
and the world stutters,
half-silent, half-raw,
like language
still deciding whether to survive
the mouth.

Devil’s Freckles

Her freckles fell like devil’s kisses
across purgatory’s pale cheek:
small suns collapsing
into whispered heat.

We counted them once,
as if numbers could hold
what wanted to scatter,
standing at the edge of ourselves,
blood quiet, breath thin enough
to hear light bruise the dark.

There was a moment:
the world paused;
a heartbeat folding into dawn,
and we wondered
whether the hourglass held sand,
or something living,
still learning how to burn.

Careless Magnetism

When the magnets in your chest
lose their charge,
the world collapses inward:
not loudly,
but all at once.

Grief tastes like copper,
rust blooming on the tongue,
each breath a weak echo
of a song abandoned mid-chorus.

You walk,
but your shadow lags behind,
gathering weight like weather
until it becomes another body
you must carry.

Night settles into your shoulders,
and every star bears witness
to wounds that hum:
wounds that never learned
the mercy of silence.

Dust & Honey Codex

I keep a codex of dust:
margin notes of what was misplaced,
pressed between the ribs of waking.
Honey leaks from its broken spine,
golden,
tasting faintly of afternoons
that never returned.

At first light, voices rise:
limestone, memory;
singing in dialects only shadows keep.
They murmur of cities that almost stood,
of rivers that refused their names,
of lovers who mistook sweetness
for proof.

I think:
the reasons we stay
are the reasons we leave:
a contradiction carried by wind,
like a pressed flower
still remembering
the pressure of earth.

Photo of David Lee

BIO: David Lee is a poet and physician based in Texas, originally from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His work examines memory, identity, and the intersection of the ordinary with the surreal. His poetry has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, Braided Way, and Eunoia Review. He holds degrees in philosophy and medical science and writes at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and lyric inquiry.