Sálvame o te mato
—shooting victim to surgeon
New York Times 12/5/08
Unetherized on a cold table with drain—is this
doctor or coroner caressing the body, both naked under pale light in
an odd operation? There are no tools. Nothing steel and clean in
this empty theater, where students see the drama of devotion, the
oldest story, where someone pledges a quest, to find heart and hold
it from the dogs around outside always.
You in the mask, your head a black hole in the
white, your skin my accident, my crash—to you I am delivered, a sad
package, but I have a hand left with which to plead, to reach for
your throat, no longer patient, lover.
Ed Taylor's fiction and poetry have
appeared most recently in the UK anthology In the Telling and
in Southwest Review, Elimae, Sentence, Double Room, Vestal
Review, Sleepingfish, Swink, The 2ndHand, XCP: Cross Cultural
Poetry, Nth Position (UK), and elsewhere.
