Meeting the Death Dealer

Wait-drunk. Adrenaline-bitter. Midnight hits at the hospital

and I fear the Death Dealer. The surgeon’s pastoral, red barns

and ponies, loses all integrity while Dad’s sick. Orbs of paint

recompose. They brown and congeal into welts on a toad’s back.

The Death Dealer’s war horse licks the ash from mushrooming

fire and vultures tear into the wickedness written on the carrion.

The battle axe begs for a spleen to quarter. The shield answers

the sword, scrawl after gory scrawl. Frank Frazetta’s signature.

Where is my Winslow Homer? The half-rigged sloops that hung

on my boyhood walls. Sailors fresh from a rummy nap, charging

into their sanctums of Bahamian surf. Nothing I see now

but Frazetta’s chum slick. Until my father wakes.

***

John Dos Passos Coggin is a writer based in Alexandria, Virginia. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Half and One. His nonfiction has appeared in The American Scholar, The Baltimore Sun, and The Tampa Bay Times. He also co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate and serves on the advisory board of the John Dos Passos Society.