D Anson Lee

When the Bison Speak in Static

On the rez the television dies like a hymn:

the blue screen splits into stars of salt.

Static is a herd. We press our faces close,

and the hiss becomes hooves: low, ancestral;

a thunder traveling through the bones of the trailer.

Mama says the bison live between stations,

in the white noise where names keep their shape.

We learned to read the crackle: two bumps, a long hush;

my name; the names my grandmothers lost; the sound

of a field that keeps remembering its own edges.

When we were small we spilled Kool-Aid and called the bison jokers:

they laughed, thick and clotted, on the other side of the screen.

We ran after lessons that had no fence; the air took our heels.

Later, in a city hospital, the monitors beep like distant hooves.

At night I press my ear to a plastic pulse and pretend

the prairie is simply changing channels.

Sometimes the static says: come home.

Sometimes it says: stay.

Either way, the herd walks through the seams:

through trailer seams and hospital linoleum;

and I learn that listening is a kind of migration,

that remembering is always a way of returning.

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Image by Luca Luperto from Pexels

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His work often explores themes of healing, memory, identity, and the threshold between the physical and the spiritual. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Orchards, Poetry Pea, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Spillwords.com, among others. A graduate of Boston University’s Six-Year Honors Medical Program, he later trained at the Mayo Clinic and now lives in Texas. His poetry combines lyrical intensity with precise, image-driven storytelling shaped by decades of medical practice and philosophical study.

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