To Be a Kid
Just a five-year-old kid / Yet always in and out of the hospital, / Since her first beautiful breath / Through each breath after, / With her life-giving / Yet ever-faltering lungs.
Off the Shelf is our section for creative works by medical students.
Just a five-year-old kid / Yet always in and out of the hospital, / Since her first beautiful breath / Through each breath after, / With her life-giving / Yet ever-faltering lungs.
Your bones are beautiful / And your bruises are art
A man sleeps in the sun on a bench across from the hospital. On the bench diagonally opposed, across and beside him, an almost-doctor eats cold noodles.
I wish it were different — / Dying patients, struggling hospitals, overworked health care workers, / topsy-turvy economies, politicized safety precautions, and the / uncertainty / of tomorrow.
We sit in a clumsy ring / under fluorescent lights, / halfway into the allotted one hour / before we realize that we are having / a conversation born a whole decade ago.
so one day / i can translate to my patients / what my family missed.
She’s overwhelmed with options, can’t even remember what they were, / so we decide to move on and talk about what family problems bother her.
Engaging strangers with kind eyes rather than tender faces, / Air hugs rather than warm embraces, / Family Zoom calls rather than face-to-face visits.
For all the things we read in one day — / from CT scans to emails, / toxicology reports and lab results
Chief complaint: arm pain, / Waiting in room 4. / As I enter, he looks me up and down — / What is it he’s looking for?
A first-year medical student’s stress and anxiety begin to take physical form as she navigates her first year of medical school.
A scalpel, a corpse — / His beard is neat, his eyes are / Empty. Gloves hide clammy hands / Afraid of what awaits beneath