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I fell in love with storytelling in the back of an ambulance in New York City as a volunteer EMT. I was stunned by the privilege of hearing patient’s stories and bearing witness to their pain, their joy, and their strength. In my first year of medical school, individuals told me I would become desensitized to the baffling mysteries of the body, to suffering, to death. The promise of desensitization is meant to comfort you as a student when facing your first gross anatomy dissection. It is as if to say: you will not always feel this vulnerable. I have always wondered what would happen if I tried to stay at least a little sensitized throughout my journey through medical school. That pursuit turned me into a writer.

I started writing poetry over the past few years because I found that I could convey things I could not say with prose alone. By twisting our language around, poetry forces us to look at things Straight on. Poetry is writing that is meant to be lived in. It is meant to be read aloud and memorized and held in your body. It is meant to transform you. I think that makes poetry medicine.

This poem, “Two True Stories,” is inspired by an experience I had as a bystander to a motorcycle accident on my grandparent’s farm the summer before I started medical school. This was a poem I couldn’t not write. As I was processing what had happened, I returned to these words again and again, anchoring myself in the legacy of resilience that I inherited from a long lineage of farmers out in Western New York.

My plan is to build a writing and medical practice around sharing and listening to brave truths in primary care.

TWO TRUE STORIES

subtle bend on the rural collector,

black walnut tree grown thick and varicose

on this landing place between the pine-scarp

and the lake’s edge,

dust hung in plumes

i crossed the living room to the barn sparrows nesting,

gram walked out for the mail,

jul arched the hose at her begonia beds,

my grandfather scouted the fields for sowing season,

and the goldenrod rooted down

in the hollows of the cattle plod groove

the dirt bike banked right—

roared and slammed against the ditch rim—

we left the red flag cocked–

the hose flooded the driveway–

we forgot everything

but the mud plug in the tailpipe

the half-moon grimace

of the boy that no one knew

everything happened so slow and so fast

my grandfather said later

one minute we were all there together—

we waited a lifetime for an ambulance

on these backroads—

and the next, i boarded the volunteer rig

in bloody pajamas,

my hand still on the bag valve,

jul close behind

and my grandfather hastened

to pick up the bits of broken

helmet in the grass

and then he set them

back

down

…

my grandfather, as a child,

watched the neighbor’s boy run

pale-faced from the mill

cradling his crushed

rose-petal

hand

Ms Irvin is a medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.