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Laura McCullough: Maggot Therapy

September 6, 2017 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Near death, sometimes the hands curve
        into themselves like claws.
I held my mother’s open, smoothing
        the fingers, trimming the wild nails.

Once, years before, my husband and I awoke
        to a fawn caught in the family compost,
a hole on its back end festering with worms,
        and he pinched each one out

swiping his little finger in the bowl
        of the wound, then coating it
with antibiotic salve. I loved him,
        and how he saved this small thing.

It’s a story I have told over and over.
        Today though, I’m thinking of the medical uses
for maggots: biodebridement and extracorporeal
        digestion, their enzymes liquefying

dead tissue in wounds, and wonder,
        do I feed off the dead
who live inside me? When my mother was dying,
        she had a vision of her non-corporeal

father, brothers, sisters. Her last words,
        Why have you left me alone?
She never opened her eyes again,
        her chest a drowning well.

The bodily signs of death:
        the skin mottling as blood flow slows;
breathing, open mouthed; jaw, unhinged.
        I won’t recount the signs of a dying marriage,

but he left two days after her funeral. Physically,
        he returned but told me he’d fallen
in love with someone else,
        that his love for me had passed.

Above my mother’s body, orange mist
        had exhaled and dispersed, a light bulb
busted open, its luminescent gas escaping.
        The word fluorescent is so similar

to the word florescence, meaning flowering,
        and somewhere between these two,
there is a splendor I can barely stand.
        Inflorescence refers to flowers clustering

on one branch, each a separate floret,
        but if they are tightly clustered
as in the dandelion seed head, they look incomplete
        alone, though the whole is an illusion.

The word for this—pseudanthium—means “false
        flower.” Infrutescence, its fruiting stage,
gives us grapes, ears of corn, stalks of wheat,
        so many of the berries we love.

This morning my hands ache
        as though in the night I’d been trying
to claw my way out of a hole
        I am down in, having lost the body

I came into this world through, and my husband’s
        as well. It’s almost as if my body
had come to believe his was a part of its own,
        a connection he would have to break or die.

Medical experts say it takes two moltings
        for maggots to do the job well,
to feed enough to clean a wound. I do not feel
        clean at all, though in our shower,

my husband and I still huddle some days,
        hunched into the spray. We call it watering.
When we do, we scrub each other, grateful
        for the living, dying flesh, but trying to get clean

of each other. That fawn he saved way back
        when we were new in love
was released into the wild. Surely, it had a scar
        identifying it, evidence of what flesh

my husband was willing to enter
        in order to keep something alive. Lately,
he seems more clear-eyed, and it is as if a cicatrix husk
        is cracking. Neither of us know who

will emerge, but he seems luminescent,
        a kind of light created by the excitation
of the smallest elements, and not giving off warmth,
        but a cold glow that at least illuminates.

Filed Under: Contributors 96, Issue 96, Poetry, Poetry 96 Tagged With: contributors 96, issue 96, Laura McCullough, Poetry, poetry 96

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