Christine Higgins
The doctor covers my mother’s hand
with his own hand. Her hand is
a speckled egg he is keeping warm.
The nursing assistant reaches out
to touch the yellow roses,
and murmurs, “Bonito.”
Several people come in and speak
cheerily
Roz Levine
We ran from an outbreak of polio
Abandoned the Bronx for a summer hideaway
In the shadow of the Catskill Mountains
Each day we traipsed craggy trails
Stooped low beneath clear skies
Plucked mounds of dark blues
From bushes bursting
Johanna Shapiro
If you’re lucky
the doctor enthused
these drops will save your sight
Still trying to get my mind around
this new fact
that I was going blind
I asked about side effects
Hardly worth mentioning,
he said
his
Tabor Flickinger
He marked a copy of da Vinci’s sketch
To map his ailments: drew an arrow from
The eye to cataracts, the feet nerve pain.
The groin said hernia, the navel at
The center of it all colostomy.
He offers up this artifact
Albert Howard Carter III
(for NCC and RAC)
My wife lies in the little room,
tight as a drum, and even more convex.
She breathes hard as the contractions come.
The doctor, some 20 feet away,
shares his lunch with me,
the husband
Martin Kohn
(for Helen)
This openness into
This brightness onto
This bodied and
dis-embodied
sunken-eyed
knowing
This close
and blinking
moment
This shutter stop
goodbye
Your round soft
shoulder pillowed
beneath a feeble
hug
Holly Zeeb
I watched her
fling and tie
those scarves
so gracefully,
magically,
to adorn
her beautiful
shining head,
as if doves
might flutter forth.
Her steady voice
was gentle,
reassuring,
as if it were
an
Jerald Winakur
White coat, sterile gloves
my instrument dangling
but she finally died
after such a struggle–the young
always struggle so–
I listened to her chest
till it stopped then clicked
off the machine.
It sighed for us all as the
Nancy Tune
First impression: New and well appointed,
staffed by friendly people and my favorite, irony.
In the clinic hallway a woman plays a harp.
I have come to learn about the process of
my dying; surely this is meant to shake me
free of
Kendra Fleagle Gorlitsky
Are you going to take that long with all the patients?
Depends. If they’re really sick, I’ll have to.
I’m just saying…there are a lot waiting.
Well, this one tried to kill herself last year. And today she’s really hurting.
I wanted a full
Joanne M. Clarkson
For LS
Assume pain, I tell them, the young, the
minimum-waged, those who work the midnight
shift with no chance for stars. We lean
over the bed of a 93-year-old man with advanced
Doug Hester
Exhalations materialize in the dark as I walk
from the empty parking deck. I brew coffee,
then print a list–our census is up to thirty.
I grab my coat and start seeing patients:
the gastric bypasses, the nine ex-laps,
the psychotic panniculectomy patient,
© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.
