David Anson Lee

STANDARD OF CARE

The denial arrives in a language
designed to resemble grammar
without ever becoming speech.

The patient waits.

Inside the body, time keeps working
like a clerk who never leaves his desk.

The physician submits records:
scans, codes, proofs of damage
translated into acceptable doubt.

The insurer replies:
additional documentation required.

Winter requests the same of trees.
The ocean, of drowning.

Weeks accumulate without permission.

The medication sits behind a digital gate
guarded by an algorithm
that has never held fevered skin
or counted breath in a dark room.

When approval arrives, it does not arrive as mercy:
only as delay that learned to sign its name.

Too late is still a category of coverage.

The ambulance appears
after the fire has finished speaking.


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "Standard of Care"


David confesses: This poem reflects on the quiet violence of procedural medicine: how adherence to protocol can sometimes blur the boundary between care and detachment. It considers the tension between clinical language and lived vulnerability.

DAVID ANSON LEE is a retired ophthalmologist, educator, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A former endowed chair and professor of ophthalmology, his poems explore medicine, ethics, identity, history, and the hidden costs of institutional life. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.

David Anson Lee

TAX EXEMPT

The chapel carries a donor’s name
carved deep enough to outlive theology.

So does the stadium,
the laboratory,
the business school where futures are priced
in credit hours and compound interest.

At orientation, freshmen are issued
lanyards, passwords, a map
that loops back to debt.

The university expands like a body
forgetting where pain begins:
roots descending from branches,
branches feeding roots,
a system that mistakes growth for virtue.

The adjunct teaches in the blue light
of a refrigerator open too long.

Somewhere, a quarterback signs autographs
beneath a screen the size of weather.

At commencement, caps rise
like startled birds released too early
into air they cannot afford.

Years later,
the birds return
as monthly statements
that never learned mercy.


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "Tax Exempt"


David confesses: "This poem emerged from observing how moral responsibility can be obscured when harm is mediated through systems that are legally protected yet ethically ambiguous. I was interested in how language of exemption can also function as a form of emotional distancing."

DAVID ANSON LEE is a retired ophthalmologist, educator, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A former endowed chair and professor of ophthalmology, his poems explore medicine, ethics, identity, history, and the hidden costs of institutional life. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.