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.
