SPOTLIGHT -
November 15th 2024
"I say Good Morning! and he studies me in my white coat, like skin lesion he has seen only once in a textbook."
November 13th 2024
"After each lap around the circular hall the aides smile, Hello Doctor!"
November 8th 2024
"The national day had dawned."
November 1st 2024
"I am overtired, Of the great harvest I myself desired."
October 25th 2024
"...a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest..."
Owls
"I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage, though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors are supposed to stay dead."
Einstein’s Happiest Moment
"Einstein’s happiest moment occurred when he realized a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest..."
Hurried Prayer to My Chainsaw
"...I swear to not be in a half-assed rush, wear helmet & ear guards, keep my gloves on for even a fast cut..."
Senryu
Goes to the market Just to hear another voice: “Paper or plastic?”
Belief in Magic
"A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life, even though, even though this is my second heart..."
Ficus Lyrata...
"One September morning, the day I started medical school, I placed a two-foot specimen in my sunny south window."
"Ficus Lyrata"
"...the heart-shaped ficus leaves dropping like sad notes from a Spanish song..."
"Poetry"
"Poetry arrived in search of me."
Autumn Faces
"Back home, we glimpse our autumn faces in the hallway mirror."
California
"That’s when I started dreaming I could be a doctor someday, that I could get away, prescribe myself a new life."
Fallen Peaches
A psychiatrist weighs in on the breaking news in Georgia, where there is yet another school shooting.
A Blessing
"But before offering it to us over steamed rice, even before his gods, he’d serve those who were not home..."
How It Will End
"We sit on a bench to find out how it will end..."
Treating Paul Celan
"While considering Celan's suicide, I think back to Virginia Woolf drowning herself..."
"Treating Paul Celan"
"But after we’ve met for the time it takes to smoke eight hundred packs of cigarettes, after all the medication trials, the damaged sighs and side effects, I wonder, Would Celan still drown himself in the River Seine?"
“Unfolding”: Rethinking Development, A Report from the Global South
Finding social truth in poetic metaphors.
So This Is Nebraska
"So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post."
Wild
"The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars..."
Love Song
"My own dear love, he is all my world,—And I wish I’d never met him."
The Discovery
Explore a poem about death, grief, and the healing powers of the humanities.
How I Started to Use a Cane
"I was talking on the phone, walking steadier, noticed the tap, and after, the tap-step, a light knock, a knock like someone’s at the door come to visit..."
"The Scientists"
"...the beauty still intoxicating, the spirit of the research like a child swimming for the first time in the sea, awed..."
The Scientists
"By now I’ve lost track of time with this boy who reminds me of myself when I imagined becoming a doctor..."
Naïve
"Remember? Remember wanting to play every minute, as if that was why we were born?"
Black Momma Math
"How free is our will if our fate is decided by our melanin. What is the meaning of Black lives when so many people don’t think we matter?"
Questions About Angels
"Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin..."
"A Psychiatrist’s Guitar"
"...when skilled hands and callused fingertips pick sweet equations where practice becomes song."
A Psychiatrist’s Guitar
"Hear the story of wood, cut and stained and carved for someone’s need."
Spring View
"Touched by the hard times, flowers shed tears. Grieved by separations, birds are startled in their hearts."
A Poet's Lament
A psychiatrist reflects and laments on the state of the country.