Linda Evans
She lives in a small cell
on the Maximum Security Unit
pregnant with her tenth love child
the other nine scattered
like dried leaves in the wind.
Beneath the baggy government-issued jumpsuit
her belly swells and shifts with the weight of life
a heaviness of never hearing first
Andrea Gordon
She was a rainbows and unicorns girl,
predictable passions at appropriate ages.
Shy smile and just-above-average grades.
Yearly visits by the book, or, in this case,
computer screen prompts.
Milestones noted, talk about diet,
ceremonial exam, note straightness of spine.
All on track, along the mapped
Wynne Morrison
Tears should be surprising.
He is, after all, well over six feet tall,
must top 250 pounds,
always quick and confident
with a joke upon his lips.
Most of his patients weigh a pound or two.
Eyes fused shut, translucent skin,
with lives of needles, tubes,
machines
Richard Weiss
He waited, sandwiched between an angular
housewife with a cough and an accountant
whose clothing draped his skeletal frame.
When we first met he was much younger,
bearded, heavily tattooed, dressed in black,
his bulk dwarfing my consultation room,
a school custodian recovering after a painful
divorce
Bernadine Han
We were both new that day.
He had come for a new knee.
I was doing my first admission.
Suddenly he was short of breath.
He’d had a cough for a long time, yes,
with blood in it.
He decompensated,
and I watched him.
Brian T. Maurer
Ply the scalpel, crack the vault;
Peel back the layers, parcel the salt:
Galeal, subgaleal, arachnoid place,
Dura mater, subdural space,
Lobus frontalis, sulcus centralis,
Corpus callosum, fornix, and rostrum,
Hippocampus, choroid plexus,
(Anatomy most sure to vex
Ellen Diamond
And while the stuff drips in, I’m rolling over
in my mind the two words: Kemo Sabe.
It’s the name that Tonto called his friend
the Lone Ranger, back in radio days.
I could use a trusty sidekick now,
crouched
Jack Coulehan
Forty years passed. His body replaced
its cells, with the exception of his heart’s
persistent pump and the mushroom-like paste
of his brain. Only scattered synaptic charts
of his internship remain, etched in myelin,
a few of them deeply. Nonetheless, a dried
umbilical cord connects that powerful womb
Sandra Miller
When I was an intern, we carried everything.
We carried manuals and little personal notebooks, frayed and torn,
crammed with tiny bits of wisdom passed on by a senior or attending.
Yet when a midnight patient rolled in with a myocardial infarction
we didn’t
Susan Rooke
When I cannot help remembering, I recall
that the end of your memory arrived
in a Texas spring so wet it churned the rivers,
ripped white frame houses from the banks
and sent them rampaging on the currents
a developmental biologist shows us a video of a fertilized egg
dividing into two then four then eight cells–
a day’s worth of differentiation in a minute–
followed by a slide of a week old blastocycst drawn in cross section
with an outer cell mass or future placenta and an
Cortney Davis
Spring
Thirty weeks,
and the baby’s not moving.
I listen to deep silence.
Then, the pregnant belly wakes.
From beneath the mountain,
thunder singing.
Summer
The final day of OB rotation
the medical student has a choice–
see the last
© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.
