About This Title
Edited by Neeta Jain, Dagan Coppock, and Stephanie Brown Clark
Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience is an anthology comprised of poems by physicians and medical students chronicling their unique, often harrowing experiences. The anthology is broken into six sections: Medical Student; First Year; Second Year; Clinical Years; Intern; Resident; and Attending. The collection is truly unique in medical literature. With trained physicians who are also skilled poets addressing a diverse range of medical situations, Body Language offers fascinating insight into the inner world of people who regularly face life-and-death decisions.
Exposed (to her cadaver) by Rishi Doshi
My fingers course
Through rivers of blood
Parched from seasons without rain
A man once despaired
To hold you so close
Yet never could see what I've seen
I must apologize
For not being gentle
This heartstring of yours
Must snap in the name of our intimacy
And your loveable idiosyncrasies
I call anomaly
As per the instructions
I commit you
To bits of fleeting recollection
And my gratitude,
May only show when I too am discarded
To lie with decades exposed
A gift preserved in petals
Of desiccated rose
© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2006