Poetry

Keeping the season in mind, what is your first impression of this image?

That’s how he’d like to go, he tells me, not by this slow seeding of liver and spine, not with all the tears and long good-byes.

The Big Bad Wolf and Wicked Witch liked to creak the stairs by her bedroom door and wake her from dreams calling, “Daddy!”

On the cracked macadam court in the shadow of The Castle on the Hill, below fake gun turrets built with bricks...

I’m driving home from the ER, not ready for sleep, eaten up by memories of my mistakes...

Featuring this year in Rorschach tests at Psychiatric Times.

We’ve been meeting since his PSA spiked and he decided on surgery. Radiation finished, nerves nicked by the robot...

After a managed care company calls me to be “a prescriber,” I recall The Book of Dinosaurs my grandfather gave me the day I turned seven.

This sunflower at the 9/11 Memorial said that a ray of sunshine remains, and that life blooms anew, in spite of the losses.

It's always a brain tumor when I have a headache. “Don’t be crazy,” I tell myself, “You’re just inventing a doctor-mind catastrophe.”

In a world in which substance use disorders are no longer suffered in isolation, treating addiction is a challenging journey with obstacles, intermittent failures, and life-altering successes. A poem on drug withdrawal expressed through the eyes of a fellow in addiction medicine.

Painting and writing are ways in which this clinician expresses herself and relaxes after a hard day's work with patients.

When I learned my first scale at 45 I knew I would never rip loose and free like the pros who started as teenagers, when time didn’t matter and practicing was just another form of play.

I begin by remembering my hours as a patient and Freud’s “Fundamental Rule”: Say Whatever Comes to Mind...

We do not have to set time aside to do something that helps validate our experience, while simultaneously coping with it. The lesson expressed in this psychiatry resident's poem.

When I’m hungry, I love to stroll past the campus barnyard and visit the colorful, caged characters who live, like me...

The frayed dignity of the patient described in this poem, his intelligence matched by the inexplicable intransigence of his alcoholism, moved this VA psychiatrist to describe the clinical encounter, apropos for April, Alcohol Awareness Month.

I’d love to create a new set every year, our glossy portraits on one side, caduceus in the corner, honors, cure rates, and publications on the back...

What is your first impression of this ink blot?

In the process of both psychotherapy and sculpture, this psychiatrist discovered there is potential for an exciting and rewarding life. Here, a representative piece from his collection.

When a full-time writer's husband was diagnosed with cancer, she found writing poetry helped her cope. She guessed that others would, like her, find their experiences with cancer best expressed through poetry. So began The Cancer Poetry Project.

Three years deep in despair, he’s swallowed every pill I prescribed...

Under the V of her cashmere sweater, sacs of silicone sag in tangled scar, their arc of cleavage a triumph...

If I could be edible, I would want to be a steamed vegetable dumpling, pure white like my doctor’s coat…

While I watch the artist paint, I imagine him in the time of plague crafting a portrait of a Medico della Peste, a Plague Doctor wearing an ibis-like mask...