david dodd lee

Attic Series

Where were you when the wind was in shackles?

Face down on the mattress,

munching on dust. Three out of four

rooms in the house were ablaze or aghast.

Hear the murmuring birds?

I can feel their bones shifting, you said.

Hush, now. Pick up the pace.

(It’s a movement of war). Try to steer him

with your thighs,

make the document manic.

Puncture

& it seems to me now, my life was just about

erasures.

My lover’s at the sawmill, knuckles white.

The air so cold the trunks

divide themselves. Snow settles.

When I kiss his frozen temples,

I think of words in tandem: baby, save.

The mind has ways, I mean

it makes an exit for a child. A foreign

kind of depth to that sweet rage.

kristin abraham