David Dodd Lee

After Receiving a Bill from the Water Department That Wasn't Mine

In the baby book it says I had pyloric
stenosis, “fine after operation.” I never

knew what caused that scar. All these
cops everywhere, doctors flipping open

charts, someone whose job it is to make
sure the tap water keeps flowing. I’ve got a

well. And a snake’s skin laid out on
vellum. Once I found the thimble of half

a robin’s egg, tipped skyward, filled with
rainwater. I picked it up and peered inside

at the tiny globe of teardrop-colored water
at the bottom of which lay a single deceased

ant. All of our deaths take place to scale.

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David Dodd Lee is the author of ten 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), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, Chattahoochee Review and Diode) & is currently making final edits on Flood, a novel. He is also a painter, collage artist and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Hunger, The Rumpus and Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, original poems, erasures and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in 2019. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.