Poetry
Poetry has been a lifelong touchstone for me. I look to my favorite poets when I’m seeking solace and wisdom: Theodore Roethke, Jim Harrison, and W.S. Merwin, to name a few. Writing and translating poetry allows me to process and share the experiences I find meaningful, including the many powerful stories I encounter as a physician in training.
Camera Obscura
Winner of the 2022 William H. Greene MD Poetry Prize
The body in our textbooks is organized
Like a map of a subway system
Straight red lines for arteries
The gut simplified into one long tube.
Static arrows pin whirling enzymes
Like butterflies to a board.
Breathing life into such flat figures
Is to transform into a camera obscura
Projecting inward that network of red lines
Onto a constellation of bony landmarks,
Reassuringly palpable and familiar.
I hook inexperienced fingers
Under my own costal margin,
Slip into the polyphonic strum of sensation—
With a visceral chirp, my liver says:
"I am here!"
Its voice resonating through my fingertips,
Tracing a new topographic line on my map.
…
The mute flesh of another
Is so jarringly familiar
And disorientingly silent.
Bohemian Rhapsody in mono.
Searching for my first patient's pulse,
I felt like I was driving with one eye closed
Pins and needles sprouting in my home field
Lost in a city I thought I knew.
To learn the art of medicine
Is to dissect and stitch together
The membranous layers of difference beneath the skin
To see the red lines for what they are:
Branching arteries anastomosing between us,
My father's pulse in every wrist
My Tiffany
Composed in 2023, inspired by by the transition from preclinical courses to clerkships.
I've never felt more feminine
Draped in my first stethoscope,
An expensive necklace
To mark my caring vocation.
I will be a professional
Woman—peddling comfort and life,
I wring warmth into my hands
And squeeze shrill from my voice,
My feet forever low-heeled.
I’ve never felt more feminine
Teetering upon shoulders,
Steady, sloped shoulders
The proud shoulders of
Generations of medicine women,
A lineage of witches and midwives
Who call to me in "Edelweiss,"
"Barges" and cool washcloths
On my burning forehead,
I've never felt more feminine
As I kneel on shoulder pads
To lift my Oma from the shade
Straining against the starched seams
Of calcified compassion
I allow myself to be a conduit,
For the softness of lullabies
On lullabies on lullabies
Bending to reclaim a matriarchy,
I've never felt more feminine.
One Hundred Games of Cribbage
Adapted from a poem published in Capillaries: The Narrative Medicine Journal during my undergraduate.
“Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and there ain’t no more”
How many hands will six months hold?
Cribbage weaves a conversational rhythm
Playful counting rhymes like a secret code,
A language passed down the generations
I learned cribbage twice:
Once from my mother, at seven
And once from Gene, at twenty.
My mother used cribbage to teach me arithmetic
Now I count games to monitor Gene—
Hospice uses crude measures of health:
“Two games” says more than “Moderate decline,”
I listen for miscounts, missed rhymes, missed
breaths—the voice of ashen solitude
After one hundred games together,
I can feel it prickling in the stagnant air…
Between hands, Gene tells me wonderful stories
Of bears, and silver thaw, and first dates in Chinatown.
Do you know how to catch rainbow trout in the Skykomish?
Go softly at dusk, and bring shiny bait.
On Sundays at 6:00 I fish with gentle silence
And a foil packet of cowboy cookies.
Opening reservoirs for stories of a life well lived,
I hold space for the burdens of its close.
Cyanocobalamin
A selection from the final project of my favorite course as an undergraduate: Poetry & Permaculture.
We left something in the water
Way back when we were legless.
Before the bacteria forsook us
Unbreathing eons ago
We too knew how to glean cobalt
From the rippling ocean tides.
On landside we began
Drowning for cobalamin,
Buoyed up by the good earth
We drank the fields dry
Intrinsic factor unslakable.
Elephants of the ocean,
The oysters never forgot–
Neural nets woven daily.
Diving buffleheads catch
Secrets in the undulating waves,
Beading the sea's underside
With iridescent bivalves,
Embroidering the coastline with
Pearly French knots.
The pockmarked beach breaths,
Seething in charmless unison.
Those razor sharp sunchokes
Slice the line between animal
Plant and stone simultaneously.
To personify the colossal alien
Lapping coldly at my toes–
Unplowable smoothness,
Serpentineness embodied.
To call my mother my mother
I leap upstream at close of day.
Cascades
Published in Capillaries: The Journal of Narrative Medicine
There's something awesome between us:
Snow capped peaks shining in the sun
Shadowy trees filled with verdant promise
Roots of magma glowing between tectonic plates.
It makes the distance more bearable,
To think of our catastrophic ski adventures
Weeks of starry nights and lakeside beers
Mountains of fries shared in speed trap towns.
What's a year with fifty summers on our horizon?
One June I'll take you to the Teanaway Valley
Another July you'll show me the Enchantments
I can't wait to see what each August brings.
We'll be together in the Cascades this winter,
Every night, dreaming ourselves into the mountains
Our cabin already cuddled between the pines
Hearth kept aflame by the family before us.
May we break through the icy trail before us,
Our hands warmed by tomorrow morning's coffee
Steaming breath intertwined across the pass
The moonlit hoarfrost will guide us home.