22) ICU*

       Wolran Kim

 

A helicopter sent from heaven

Transported his fate to the LDS Hospital

After taking off a sheet at Alta View Hospital

Although just a few small gallstones

A life moves on the operating table, causing numbers on monitors

That hit the limit of conditions

Like Benjamin Button*, an eighty-year-old newborn baby

Has a bare head and his false teeth fallen down from the gum

Everytime the number changes as a morphine needle

His pubic hairs secretly show as the dignity that he had kept for a lifetime

Under the sheet that he had grabbed in pain

Between the gaunt thighs of time

The oxygen respirator, attached with two rubber bands

Is coarser than a plastic toy that the patient begs for life

From an obstacle to speaking, the phlegm, stuck, my throat, written on the paper

The thing that tightened his breath was the phlegm

Flowers are not allowed in this room, and

Only plastic tubes were entangled like a cockpit in a UFO

Everytime the pain goes over the number of morphine

He will call a heavy American woman in a pajama-like uniform

While this room on earth tries to communicate with the stars all night

He has a violent fit of confusion as if someone moved him beyond the river

If rubber tubes that look like chains are removed

Small birds will fly into the sky or come back to the earth by elevator

If a red light turns on meaning he cannot cross the river yet

It says that someone touched the clouds or reached to the sky

At this earth closest to the sky

He will roll the wheelchair with his heavily blue-veined hands

And go into his house like general care

He wishes he will fly to the sky someday without staying at this place

He dreams that he will receive a bonus time if he comes back to this place

A bird that raises his wings again from the ambulance sirens

Is not far from the nest

 

* ICU: Intensive Care Unit

* Benjamin Button: The main character in the short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922