Inventory of Missing Persons, Filed Under Fluorescent Light
There was no announcement.
Only a chair that stayed empty
longer than politeness allows.
We kept speaking around it:
weather, prescriptions,
the cost of small mercies;
as if absence were a language
we had agreed not to learn.
Later, someone checked the hallway.
The doors were closed
in a way that suggested completion.
A chart appeared at the desk
with a name that flickered.
The receptionist traced it once
with her finger, then stopped.
No alarms. No questions.
Only the soft rearranging of bodies
to avoid the vacancy.
By afternoon, the chair was gone.
No one remembered where it had been.
Only a rectangle of lighter floor
insisted something had once waited there.
Body Map with Unlabeled Rooms
The doctor gestures to a diagram
as if the body were cooperative.
Here, he says, is where it begins.
But my pain won’t stay put.
It travels like a rumor:
shoulder to throat,
throat to somewhere unnamed.
At night, I walk its corridors.
A staircase appears beneath the ribs,
descending into breath.
Doors line the spine, all closed.
I open one:
a childhood fever still burning.
Another: a voice repeating my name
with slight variations.
There is no central room:
only passage after passage,
each convinced it is the origin.
In the morning, I return to the chart.
The doctor circles a place
that does not exist.
I nod, because something in me
has already agreed.
David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and now living in Texas. His work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, Braided Way, and Eunoia Review, among others. His writing explores liminal spaces where memory, environment, and the body intersect, often blending the clinical with the surreal.
Image: Marino Linic, unsplash.com
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