SPOTLIGHT -
"Summer, Like the Body"
"You feel in your bones the gray gravity of late August clouds..."
The New Colossus
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."
"Contemplating Retirement"
"Patients get better, treatments end, openings appear in my schedule and I leave them open..."
Passing through Albuquerque
"Moments like that, you can love this country..."
Summer Kitchen
"We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle."
"Grappelli’s Smile"
At the Pitch
"If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness..."
Grappelli’s Smile
"...Then twenty years swing by and I’m riffing chords on my father’s old D’Angelico, Grappelli’s photo clipped to the stand, an image captured the night he owned the ballroom stage, me on the dance floor..."
Joy
"I'm thinking about how good it is to have been sick, to have been turned inside out..."
Advice from a Raindrop
"You think you’re too small to make a difference?"
Skilcraft Visible Man Anatomy Kit, 1960
"And when she allows our eyes to meet my joy from her gift pleases her more than I can understand on this birthday she loved to call my first day of medical school."
The Hummingbird: A Seduction
"...I would take you and take you and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted."
"Skilcraft Visible Man Anatomy Kit, 1960"
"Lost in the anatomy of wonder, moments pass before I catch my mother’s smile while she pretends to dust her shelves..."
The Ordinary Weather of Summer
"In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain..."
Reviewing History and Options
What is the first thing you share with your patient when you are about to prescribe a new medication?
Love in a Time of COVID-19
"I love you as one loves the sickest patient: terminally, between the diagnosis and the death."
"The Not Dead"
"...the fresh cut grass a living carpet where all of us lay down and dream death will come to everyone except me."
The Not Dead
"We call them The Not Dead when they crumple in an easy chair after chemo..."
A Little Closer to the Edge
"O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season."
The Portrait
"She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping..."
Thank You
"...you are the air of the now and gone..."
"The Algebra of Kindness"
"And we laughed again because he made us feel safe and loved, even when we stumbled, his calculated goal to teach us how to solve for X when X equals kindness."
The Algebra of Kindness
There are only three kinds of people in the world, those who are good at math and those who aren’t.
The Bridge
"And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make a bridge..."
Today
"...well, today is just that kind of day."
Making a Fist
"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own."
"I Cursed Him"
"My mind screams, Sociopath! Liar! but I know he’s gone..."
I Cursed Him
The Importance of Cultural Understanding
How important is it to understand a person’s ethnicity and cultural norms when developing a treatment plan?
All in Green Went My Love Riding
"All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn..."