They brought me a paper
thinner than frost on grass,
inked in a hand that shimmered like gnats at dusk.
“It’s only formality,” said the man
whose pupils glinted green as coins.

I read the clauses:
no blood for bread,
no naming of kin,
no return without invitation.

I am a lawyer; I have seen language bleed.
But their commas breathed,
their periods sealed like graves.
When I signed, the pen bit back:
its nib drew sap, not ink.

Later, my office rearranged itself:
filing cabinets turned to cairns,
contracts to cocoons,
each clause humming a low, hungry music.

A client’s son came home with briar in his eyes
and would not answer to his name.
Their receipt arrived folded into a moth,
its wings stippled with my initials.

Now, I keep two pens:
one for drafting mercy,
one for erasure.
At midnight I whisper punctuation into hedges:
comma for delay, colon for bargaining,
and leave the fae a copy of the law
translated into birdsong.

They adore the letter, not the spirit;
they kneel to phrasing, not intent.
Still, I bargain in their dialect of silence,
and the hedgerows listen.

If you must sign with the Good Neighbors,
write your name backward,
ink it in rainwater and moonlight,
then burn the paper
and scatter the ash at a crossroads.

[David Anson Lee was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and now lives in Texas. A graduate of Boston University and Mayo Clinic alumnus, he is both a physician and an emerging poet. His work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Silver Birch Press, The Orchards, Poetry Pea, and many others. His poetry often reimagines myth, medicine, and the sacred in the modern world.]