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for the Ten Days
Madeleine Mysko
We say goodbye, her hand goes up (but not
in time to catch me), then the breach: I kiss
my mother on the cheek. Oops, I say,
you’d better wash your face. We laugh, of course–
that’s the better way to make it through
the chemotherapeutic calendar.
But it’s no joke. Her white cell count is low.
I see my mother back away from me.
I’m treacherous. I’ve not observed the Ten
Solemn Days of Abstinence. Oh what
to do but put a finger to the lips,
and teach the mouth never to kiss, never
to take a breath, or utter Mother, while
stepping lightly past your door, O Death.
About the poet:
Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University. She serves as coordinator of the “Reflections” column for The American Journal of Nursing. Her novel Bringing Vincent Home is based on her experiences as an Army nurse stateside during the Vietnam War. Her poetry and fiction appear widely in literary journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Baltimore Sun and The American Journal of Nursing.
About the poem:
“In the octave of this unrhymed Petrarchan sonnet, I confess
For Dr. WCW
Randall Weingarten
Williams brought over a bag of plums,
A tree of white blossoms,
A locomotive
And images of
Her threadbare ankles
I’ve loved his poems
The pages are all
Dog-eared now,
Tear-stained
Or smiling
I know this woman
Sitting at the window
The child on her lap
The tears on her face
And that old woman
With her bag of plums
So sweet, so tasty
I know that attic of despair
The hooks of her gown
Undone,
The whisper of
Silk and cotton
Falling to the floor
Her veined body emerging
From the tangles
How I have labored
With him
On those dark nights
In Paterson
The women crying out
For dear life
And the men
Tweedling in their outer rooms
How I have cherished
Those white chickens
And the words flung in
The wheel tracks
On his way home
About the poet:
Randall Weingarten went to Dartmouth College and Tufts Medical School and did his psychiatry residency at Stanford University. “My life has revolved around clinical practice and medical education. I have been a longtime practitioner ofchanoyu, the Japanese ceremony for offering
Fleeing Alzheimer’s
Sandra Miller
My left hand is an idiot.
I don’t think it can save me.
Deep in my brain, the old twine of brittle DNA,
the sparks of my memory and blasted circuits,
fizz and fray.
The spiral staircase twists, leading nowhere.
They say learn something new
so I rouse the dormant piano and try to
find the stretch, learn the reach
but my left hand bangs out sour notes and
my right hand, my anchor, derails in dismay.
She haunts me, she follows me, she plucks at my sleeve …
I won’t turn and look
at her chickadee eyes and empty-gourd head,
fumbling at spoons, hair gone askew.
I grasp my loose button, twirling on one thread,
wobbly and worthless.
It’s nearly gone.
Over and over I drill the arpeggio but
my left hand is an idiot.
I don’t think it can save me.
She’s coming.
About the poet:
Sandra Miller has been a faculty member at Banner Good Samaritan Family Medicine Residency for nearly twenty-five years and is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “My college
Reentry
Sara Brodsky
I sit with three demented women in their nineties.
Three after-dinner conversations fly,
banging into each other,
ricocheting,
drifting off course.
Aunt Sylvia insists she must call her mother.
Edith announces she works for her father.
Mimi declares she has two daughters.
I grab onto this shooting star.
“Where do your daughters live?” I ask.
Mimi closes her eyes, and I watch
as the star’s tail
evaporates.
Edith says she starts work early the next morning.
My aunt frets, “We’re the only people left.”
Mimi declares she has two daughters.
I try. I ask, “What are their names?”
She shuts her eyes and loses the light.
“You see that woman?” my aunt asks.
All eyes follow her pointing finger.
A woman in a calf-length bathrobe shuffles past.
“She’s always going to the bathroom. What does she do in there?”
“Maybe she loves sitting in there,” I say.
Aunt Sylvia guffaws.
Edith chuckles.
Mimi smiles.
Grounded.
About the poet:
Sara Brodsky is a writer and cabaret artist near Boston, MA. Her first career was in healthcare communications, but she left that path to
ADHD
Patricia Ljutic
A flywheel
launched from a brain
that cannot remember
three consecutive words–
two words, maybe:
“Stop kicking…”
The third word catapults with
the what and the where,
changing channels
with every new activity,
leaving my son aimless,
scattering stones,
snapping twigs,
belching at turned heads,
spinning.
“S-T-O-P!”
What does stop mean with his
thoughts ajar?
ADHD: attention
without a footpath,
a train without a brake.
Ignoring directions,
my son’s frontal lobe sputters
–winds and unwinds–
toggling like a switch
that switches…that switches…that switches,
careens him into space.
Spinning.
About the poet:
Patricia Ljutic, a registered nurse, is director of the Home Health and Hospice Quality program at Vallejo Kaiser Permanente Foundation Hospital, in California. Her poetry and essays have appeared in regional and national publications including Cup of Comfort and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She has won awards for her fiction and nonfiction from Writer’s Digest and Writer Advice.com, respectively. Patricia loves Italian country cooking, amber jewelry, writing, bugging her son to pick up his clothes and food containers, teaching him to live with ADHD and reminding
Kennet Square Clinic
Jessica Bloom
The young woman’s daughter
is shy and beautiful.
Her mother comes to the clinic
with vague complaints:
headache, stomach pain,
fatigue, weakness.
A small, sturdy woman
with an anxious face,
her square jaw is just a bit
bigger on the left. I picture
the long-healed fracture
in her jutting mandible,
sealed beneath unbroken skin
the color of wheat fields.
Her story is slow to come out.
Many of the patients here
migrate from Mexico each year
to work on the mushroom farms.
I imagine the smell of wet dirt,
the cool, shadowy barns
with stacked rows of wooden pallets,
soft, white globes emerging
out of black soil.
I do not know the nature
of their toil, but I know
the weak resistance,
the fragile release,
of pulling a mushroom
from the earth.
I understand only pieces
of her rapid Spanish, but hear
the edgy thread of despair
that unravels in her voice,
suggesting the tight fist of her will
in which she holds her self-control.
The woman admits
to feeling depressed.
She believes her husband
drinks too much,
and has been unfaithful.
Presentation
William Toms
The patient is a 61 yo M with a Hx of NIDDM, ASCAD, HBP, COPD and CHF who presents with chest pain radiating to his jaw and both arms for thirty minutes, accompanied by diaphoresis, SOB and nausea. PE shows bibasilar rales, generally regular rhythm with frequent ectopy, an S3 gallop, 2+ JVD, liver edge 10 cm below RCM, 2+ edema. EKG shows Q’s V 1-4, STE V 3-6; CXR shows cardiomegaly and basilar congestion. Initial CPK and troponins are elevated…
and his wife is in the waiting roomterrified
and his children are on the wayworried
and his dog is at homeconfused
and his flowers are in their bedsgrowing
and, yes, he has a Living Will
and, yes, he would like a tissue
to wipe away his tears
About the poet:
Bill Toms was medical director at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene, a large group practice, for nine years, retiring in 2005. He now practices part-time, seeing homebound patients for his colleagues, and leads discussions regarding listening to patients at Dartmouth Medical School. “I have been fortunate to have been a family physician in
In Line at the Hospital Coffee Stand
Tabor Flickinger
At the coffee stand as always getting tea,
so always that the ladies see my weary face
and start the water steaming without words.
I hover there with others waiting think through labs to check
imaging to glance at does he have pneumonia or pulmonary edema
has social work found her a nursing home will his family want a feeding
tube despite his end-stage dementia did I order cytology on that peritoneal
fluid when will I next see the sun it’s so
“Oh, did you take care of him before? He’s dead.”
unnatural in here fluorescent
now where was I peritoneal fluid hey I wonder who is dead
“Yes, I heard. We all had him at some point.
He was in the hospital every few weeks for his heart and renal
failure. What happened?”
“He didn’t want to suffer anymore. Had us turn off his defibrillator.
Stop dialysis. Arrhythmia. Likely hyperkalemia.”
I know the man they mean without names.
I took care of him before. He’s dead.
His heart pumped ten percent it couldn’t keep fluid out
of his lungs and felt like drowning sometimes better after
dialysis but he hated the fistula in the arm that got
The Hallway
Colleen Fogarty
Sitting here, waiting to teach a medical student.
My eyes lock
onto the windowed display cabinet of anatomic pathology specimens.
Aging bottles of shriveled dun-colored parts, pale reminders of bodies once vital.
My thoughts drift
my rib pain, localized, continuous, nagging.
my breast cancer, localized, excised, treated…just over a year ago.
What pains my rib?
Mets?
Muscles?
These tumor specimens cut too close.
I got my daughter to kindergarten; what about sixth grade?
About the poet:
Colleen Fogarty, an associate professor in the University of Rochester Department of Family Medicine, has dabbled in poetry and prose most of her life. Medical school temporarily killed her creative muse. In the years since residency, she has published creative work in Health Affairs, The Journal of Family Practice, Family Medicine and Medical Humanities. She practices and teaches writing fifty-five-word stories with colleagues and residents and edits the “55-Word Stories” column for Families, Systems, and Health.
About the poem:
“This poem is about an experience during a teaching session that brought me,