Air Hunger
His diseased lungs / stiff like dry clay / function like gills out of the water.
Poetry Thursdays
Poetry Thursdays is our initiative to highlight poetry and prose by medical students, with a new post every Thursday. If you are interested in contributing or would like to learn more, please contact our editors.
Contributing Writer
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Tulsi Patel is a second year medical student in the MD/MPH program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She graduated from Columbia University in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in neuroscience and behavior. She loves listening to podcasts, visiting art museums, reading poetry, hiking, and running outdoors. Tulsi is excited to explore pediatrics and internal medicine while centering health equity by applying her public health degree, narrative medicine, and humanism in medicine.
champagne tap
she is curled on her side like a child / eyes closed, back exposed.
Dying Is Not
Dying is not / as romantic as I once thought. / I think you always knew this.
More Than Skin Deep
Our successes are born out of / The communities that uplifted us. / The teachers that pushed us.
Choreiform Tango
The intruder slithers in at midnight, / slinking his way to the boy fast asleep, / the tangled mess of hospital wires his field of untrimmed grass,
Operating Room
As I step carefully into the sterile field / past the rows of scalpels, forceps and clamps, / I sense a gentle fluttering in my chest.
Caduceus
Should the symbol of medicine bear one snake or two? / If you answered two, then the joke is on you! / Or, at least, that’s the current popular view.
Trauma Shift
I imagine her mother / Squeezing daughter’s limp hand / Silent tears
Anatomy: A Cadaveric Poem
Anatomy is more than flesh and bone and blood. / It’s more than the donor and the scalpel teaching the student.
HPI
good morning, i’m the medical student / i must ask how you are feeling / even though my eyes already sting
Borborygmi
Borborygmi: Rumbling or gurgling noises made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines.
Scan to Scan
A fog of emotions blankets the waiting room / Stress and anxiety, with some impending doom.
Contributing Writer
The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine
Nisitha is a third year MD/PhD student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Her PhD will be in genetics with an emphasis in lung cancer metastasis. In 2016, she graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science in molecular genetics. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, painting, and singing.