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Abduction


by Dennis Mahagin


Ed Munch 
of Massapequa, 
suffering much
with fibroids in the solar 
plexus, slick half moon 
cysts and then some, 
with bald head thrust 
between knees

on the floor
of the sick room—
Ballard Hospice, bars
on stained glass—Edward 
with jowls the color of sunflowers, 
advances upon end-stage liver failure, 
tossing his lunch on the tiles, Ed begs, 
between shallow frothy rasp, heave 
and retch, for egress, for egress.

Only a year ago, he'd been stocking shelves
at a Pensacola gallery when the illness bloomed,
a scab on his wrist, which he picked, and rubbed,
like a scratch-off lottery ticket, he bled

in streaks, like Pollock upon
the polished cover of a Nolde print,
he swooned, and stumbled
from the curator's room, a dozen
slack jawed stares in his wake.

Only a month ago,
they'd been pumping him
with Dilaudid at night,
to adjust his palette for what was
coming, in the soft lamp light he
watched his long fingers sprout pink
caterpillar fuzz, knuckles morphed
into hinges for Monarch butterflies,
and Edward laughed, thinking to
simply shake his bone erosion
and jaundice like a common cold.

Today they've taken
the opiates away, inexplicably
in favor of time-released Interferon
with no magical properties, better
for the injured spleen
while squeaky-toed nurses come
and go in loose white shifts,
with pursed lips and a practiced
judgment behind professional
eyes, they've come to watch
Edward die.

“Are you alright, Mr. Munch?” one
of them inquires; she stacks the bedpan
brimming with cocoa-colored stool atop
an untouched cafeteria tray, she lets the plates
clatter with a lackluster hate, simply because
she can, “Can you stand?” she asks
coldly, “we really need to get you
back in the bed.”

“I was a painter,” Edward says,
hours later, to the quiet night, quaking
then, at the sudden sight of a pint-sized
extra-terrestrial intruder with almond
tear ducts and celestial breath-plumes
arcing like comet tails through the pool
of moonlight in his tiny room;
the creature nods
appreciatively at a charcoal landscape
etching Munch had made in a moment
of lucidity, one afternoon last month,
or was it the month before?

“I saw you, Munch whispers,
“on the bridge, the vanishing point,
the most innocent eyes ever in the
universe. And I wonder… is it done?
You know I've already begun a series
in copal, called Star Spatter Deep
Space, and I am so very ready
to be gone from this place…
Any time, really, any
time you are.”


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