All Heart Matters

Narratives Help Heal Childhood Traumas

author and art therapist Mary Shannon

I recently communicated with Mary Shannon, author, art therapist and clinical social worker. She is the author of The Sunday Wishbone, a searing memoir, that painfully and poignantly reveals her sexual abuse as a young child at the hands of her mother.

In a recent email with me, Shannon wrote, “Writing is a struggle against silence.”
Throughout Shannon’s career in both clinical and administrative human service positions, she has consistently turned to the arts for their ability to provide insight and healing for her clients. Her myriad of work includes teaching medical students in the Bronx, New York to serving as co-faculty for continuing medical education workshops or presenting at international health and humanities conferences.

In an article published in The Independent, Zoe Hilton, policy advisor for child protection at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), acknowledges that “Professionals in all areas of the system tend to be disbelieving of cases of female sexual abuse”. In her role at the NSPCC, Hilton is responsible for lobbying the Government and advising on what systems need to be put in place to tackle the sexual abuse of children across the board. She argues that – as a first step – there needs to be “far more training and education and greater reporting of female sexual abuse when such cases do come to light”

It takes much courage to write about the abuses and loss of innocence from childhood. How does one ever answer the question of how those individuals that one trusts and loves could ever inflict injury and harm on a child? For sure, Mary Shannon’s narratives continue to rescue and heal her in many ways. I might add that she recently earned a second master’s degree from Columbia University in narrative medicine in Dr. Rita Charon‘s celebrated program.

Here is a link for Mary Shannon’s recent story, “Reconstructing a self” published in the Hektoen International journal.
Mary earned a second master’s degree from Columbia University in narrative medicine in 2010, and her first master’s in clinical social work in 1988. She has done post-graduate work in medical art therapy at UC Berkeley, and served as a clinical bioethics intern at the world renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center under a National Institute of Health grant.

Throughout her career in both clinical and administrative human service positions, Mary has consistently turned to the arts for their ability to provide depth, insight and healing for herself and her clients. She continues to teach medical students in the Bronx, New York, to serve as co-faculty for continuing medical education workshops or and to present at international health and humanities conferences.

I encourage readers to read her impactful memoir.

Poetic Medicine Awakens Human Voices

Poet John Fox

John Fox is a certified poetry therapist and associate professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. In many ways, John is an itinerant poet and offers his own version of healing chautauquas throughout the nation. Chautauquas were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century bringing entertainment, education and enlightenment to communities. While this peripatetic poet has no need to pitch a tent for his poetry revivals, his words and demeanor work wonders for those participants in his poetry workshops.

Fox’s Institute for Poetic Medicine founded in 2005 serves to help heal broken bodies and stories through poems and stories. His next circuit stop is San Diego on April 27-29. His holistic version of writing poetry enables many individuals to address emotional issues and to offer solace to agitated hearts. This scheduled program is called, My Heart Broke Loose on the Wind: Recovering a Sense of Freedom and Surprise.In a recent e-mail John wrote to me. “When your writing is met deeply and allowed to†flourish in ways thoughtful people develop with extravagant permission and genuine support to risk and try things out, when all of your feelings are welcomed, poetry as healer can take deeper root. Your unique way of writing can help mend brokenness and bring meaning to yourself and to others in a tremendously wide range of ways. “John’s poems, especially “When Someone Deeply Listens To You” is a poignant reminder about the importance of listening. Something that more physicians need to be attentive to when they are seeing their patients. The patient often begs for anyone and especially their doctor or surgeon to hear their broken story.I also want to bring to your attention an upcoming program that John Fox along with Dr. David Watts and poet Joan Baranow host in San Rafael, California on July 14-16, entitled, The Healing Art of Writing: A Workshop Exploring Creative Writing and Healing. Last year I shared with one of my English classes at the University of South Carolina Sumter,English 285 Literature & Medicine clips from the excellent documentary, Healing Words:Poetry and Medicine. In that compelling video, John Fox weaves his magic as a poet, encouraging patients to write their poems. As a teacher and as a recovering heart patient, I know this is good medicine.

Send me your poems and stories.

ILLNESS AS NARRATIVE

Ann Jurecic’s new book, Illness as Narrative, offers substantive confirmation of the continuing scholarly trends in support of the genre of narrative medicine and for the primary value of the patient’s voice in the practice of medicine. As an assistant professor of English at Rutgers, she demonstrates her seamless erudition and scholarship in a critical close reading and examination of a range of literary responses to the salient work of Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, Eve Sedgwick, Reynolds Price and Ann Fadiman.
Jurecic is a mindful reader and she successfully provides a succinctly written arc of the emergence of illness narratives in the twentieth century. ” She writes.” As this overview of the evolving genre of illness memoirs has shown, throughout the past century Americans have increasingly turned to writing to explore the meaning of illness and suffering, and they are more often choosing to make these narratives public in books, magazines, and now online.”

Certainly, as a blogger I have witnessed the proliferation of e-patient forums and the exponential number of blogs addressing illness. Furthermore, there are websites like Dying, Surviving, And Aging With Grace that chronicles the increasing number of illness memoirs published over the past three decades.

In Illness as Narrative, the author understands very well that the intersection of literature and medicine has ushered in literary theories in the works of Rita Charon, Arthur Frank and Anne Hunsaker Hawkins “that respects the irreducibility of the writer’s body.” I am confronting this issue as I attempt to compile an anthology of poems and stories submitted in response to a medical humanities symposia I held last fall on illness narratives.
These personal responses, couched in a myriad of illness metaphors cannot be so narrowly compartmentalized into set categories or classifications requested by the publisher. For the poet who suffers an illness or the family member that witnesses this broken story, it’s the rendering of the scene or moment that matters. For sure, it’s an artful representation that must be appreciated.

Professor Jurecic in response to an email question about her own focus on illness narratives, revealed that it’s hard to pinpoint one single answer. Nevertheless, she writes.

” There was a series of events in my personal life that motivated the ideas in Illness as Narrative. The arguments in that book emerged as I became aware of a disturbing division between my professional work with narrative and my personal experience. In the 8 years during which my husband was diagnosed with cancer, a recurrence, a second type of cancer, and another recurrence, I was acutely aware of the stories that circulated in waiting rooms, hospital hallways, as well as in 20th century and contemporary literature.”

Jurecic deftly reveals with compassion and humility that there was a disconnect between her training in literary criticism and the efficacy of these illness stories overheard in waiting rooms as she patiently waited with her husband.

Both of us happen to be teaching undergraduates who express interest in the courses in Literature and Medicine. One of my students, Lacey Taylor, wrote a compelling and poignant personal essay, “Weave Us Together” on her work with autistic children at a summer camp and I am including in a compilation of poems and stories on illness.

Professor Jurecic recognizes that her students, especially the non-science-oriented English majors also benefit from connecting their expertise in language and literature to the “real world” of embodied experience and healthcare.

Her book is a must read for all Literature and Medicine courses and certainly will be added to Medical Humanities programs around the country. In her summary paragraph, Jurecic reveals her compassionate and critical skills as she addresses Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You.

” While I have learned from how others have written about Fadiman’s text, in my own conclusion I have tried to attend to the moon toward which Fadiman points. In this narrative of illness, as in many others, the ailing body points to culture, pain points to philosophy, language points to consciousness, and all point to what is still to be learned about our fragility, our mortality, and how to live a meaningful life.”

Medicine and Metaphors

Dr. Jack Coulehan, the distinguished Emeritus Professor of Preventive Medicine and Senior Fellow of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University continues to write more palpable and prescient poems.

Bursting with Danger and Music offers his compassionate eye for witnessing the inherent beauty and darkness in the daily rounds of medicine and life. In an e-mail to me he revealed, ” I think mostly in terms of medical incidents or images that strike me and the “theme” only arises as the poem develops. If you look at my work as a whole, there is a lot of overlap. Nowadays, a larger percentage of my poems arise from non-medical experiences.”

Coulehan’s poems and stories have appeared in major literary magazines and medical journals in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia; and his work is widely anthologized. His collections of poetry include The Knitted Glove (1991), First Photographs of Heaven (1994), The Heavenly Ladder (2001), and the celebrated Medicine Stone (2002).

I am also an admirer of his earlier anthology, Blood & Bone with contributions by other physicians. This specific collection added measured validation that poetry and medicine have been linked by metaphors.

Dr. Pauline Chen in a New York Times blog, “The Doctor as Poet,” asserts that ” Poetry has long been linked to medicine; in mythology, the Greek god Apollo was responsible for, among other things, both healing and poetry. And poets like John Keats, Olver Wendell Holmes Sr. and William Carlos Williams were all trained as doctors. For them and other physicians of their time, reading or writing poetry required skills not that dissimilar from those employed in daily clinical work–an ability to connect emotionally with the subject, as well as careful attention to rhythm, wheter it was in the form of verse or heartbeats and breathing.”

For sure, Coulehan knows that doctors are immersed in stories. Like William Carlos Williams, he also discovers in the ordinary, a plethora of extraordinary images; an abiding interest in other lives and generous acts of kindness.

Dr. Coulehan and his publisher, Plain View Press, have kindly granted me permission to post this poem, “The Act of Love” from his latest anthology. For those of us engaged in teaching courses in Literature and Medicine, Coulehan’s poems never disappoint since they always demonstrate his engagement with life.

The Act of Love

How foolish Celia must look

to the Haitian cab driver

on the Medicaid run!

She wears a white communion dress

the week before Easter, a sign

she brings me something more pressing

than the pain in her shoulder

and the son who doesn’t talk to her

because his wife is embarrassed.

Her hips creak in conversation,

her knees grind, but even crepitant joints

are modestly silent and stand aside

when Celia hands me a potted plant

for my office—an act of Christian love,

she says, not a sign of being personal.

As for me, I’m stunned

out of the ordinary anger

at failing to help her

by the waxy-leaves of her gesture

and I receive this wafer of the season,

heartbroken for no reason.

Humor and Healing in Medicine

These days it’s easy to see why we need more clowns and laughter in our daily life. This is especially true for those who are ill and confined to hospital beds. Last semester at the University of South Carolina Sumter campus, I taught a course in illness narratives and introduced the class to “Patch Adams,” that is, my students viewed the film about the doctor who continues to reach so many patients through the associated therapeutic benefits of laughter at his Gesundheit Institute.

Dr. Howard Carter, an adjunct professor in the Department of Social Medicine at UNC School of Medicine, has recently authored Clowns and Jokers Can Heal Us. His book examines humor in clinical settings and in popular culture. The subject matter ranges from ER humor, taboo breaking humor, jokes about sex, aging and even death. His book certainly draws upon his own work as an ER volunteer and as cancer survivor.

Carter quickly credits the contributions of Adams and Norman Cousins on the subject of humor in medical treatment. In a recent e-mail Dr. Carter reveals his rationale for the book.

” Hospitals and medical care (and especially academic attention) are often serious, rational, even grave, not to mention task-oriented, materialist, and tightly focused on issues… My book looks at the humor in clinical settings and in popular culture,” claims Carter.

Additionally, Dr. Carter is almost evangelical about finding a place for humor in all Medical Humanities curriculum. ” Humor affirms the humanity of patients, no matter how sick or injured they are. It’s part of the old fashioned term bedside manner,” adds Carter.

It appears that more academics and physicians are embracing the notion of the intersection of comics (humor) and medicine. Just this morning, I received this Medical Humanities list serve announcement from Professor Rebecca Garden, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Read on.

Comics and Medicine–Navigating the Margins July 22-24 2012

The third international interdisciplinary conference* on comics and medicine will continue to explore the intersection of sequential visual arts and medicine. This year we will highlight perspectives that are often under-represented in graphic narratives, such as depictions of the Outsider or Other in the context of issues such as barriers to healthcare, the stigma of mental illness and disability, and the silent burden of caretaking.

The conference will feature keynote presentations by comics creators Joyce Brabner and Joyce Farmer. Brabner, a comics artist and social activist, collaborated with her late husband Harvey Pekar on the graphic novel Our Cancer Year (1994), which won a Harvey Award for best graphic novel. Farmer is a veteran of the underground comics scene who nursed her elderly parents through dementia and decline as shown in her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010), which won the National Cartoonists Society award for graphic novels.

We invite proposals for scholarly papers (20 minutes) or panel discussions (60 minutes) focusing on medicine and comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, manga, and/or web comics). In particular, we seek presentations on the following—and related—topics:

• Graphic pathographies of illness and disability
• The use of comics in medical education
• The use of comics in patient care
• Depictions of the illness experience from the perspective of loved ones and family caregivers
• The interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular culture
• Ethical implications of using comics to educate the public
• Ethical implications of patient representation in comics by healthcare providers
• Trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
• The role of comics in provider/patient communication
• Comics as virtual support groups for patients and caregivers
• The use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We also welcome workshops (120 minutes) by creators of comics on the process, rationale, methods, and general theories behind the use of comics to explore medical themes. These are intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to the creation or teaching about comics in the medical context.

We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.

300-word proposals should be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2012 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org. For more information contact s.wall@utoronto.ca.

Proposals may be in Word, PDF, or RTF formats with the following information in this order:

• author(s)
• affiliation
• email address
• title of abstract
• body of abstract

Please identify your presentation preference:
• oral presentation
• panel discussion
• workshop

While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honor people’s preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 14 March 2012.

Please note: Presenters are responsible for session expenses (e.g. handouts) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and meeting registration fees). All presenters must register for at least the day on which they are scheduled to present.

Convergence of Academic LIfe and Illness Narrative

Dr. Rose Richards understands all too well the convergence of her illness story and an academic career. She has been ardently writing stories and completed a Philosophy doctoral dissertation, which was an autoenthnographic study of her own experience writing about chronic illness.

In this profile sent to me she writes. ” This type of research has a very particular pull for me because of my own health background. I developed kidney disease at eight months after contracting hemolytic uremic syndrome. I began treatment for this when I was seven. After a childhood and adolescence of doctor’s visits, medication, blood tests and a very restrictive diet I had a kidney transplant in 1991. ”

The academic writer generously credits the inspiring autoethnographic work of Andrew Sparkes and Carolyn Ellis. Also, she is careful to acknowledge the influence of Arthur Frank and Arthur Kleinman‘s enormous contributions on the role of illness narratives.

In her dissertation abstract, Richards presents a series of core questions she addressed. Naturally, in this blog and thousands of others, more individuals are also struggling to answer and understand these similar issues:

How do I tell my story of chronic illness once I have had an organ transplant?

Can my story change?

How do I describe myself: The well, the ill, the impaired, the disabled, the afflicted?

Do I describe myself living in no man’s land?

Dr. Richards, understands that the process of writing about an illness is chalk full of problems, including the danger of simplifying the story line. Like so many others that have experienced an illness or heart stopping event, we do understand this message she forwarded.

” I came to see that I did not have to choose between well and ill, but could occupy a third space where I could be both and neither. I found this liberating. It explained to me who I am post-transplant. It also showed me that stories are dynamic and one needs to bear that in mind when telling them. They ought not to ossify.”

Send me your story.

Healing Poetry From Out of Bounds

poet Tish Pearlman

It’s early into the New Year and I am busy compiling an anthology entitled, The Art of Medicine: Poems & Stories. It’s abundantly clear that all illness poems and stories share a common ground: they enable us to document how illness has affected our lives and the lives of those closest to us.

I recently received an e-mail from Tish Pearlman originally from Southern California and now in Ithaca, New York, where she hosts and produces an award winning radio program, Out of Bounds, a weekly public affairs and arts interview format. She’s a veteran broadcast journalist and poet who has published widely, including in The Healing Muse, an annual journal of literary and visual art, published by SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

Her communication to me was precipitated by the knowledge of our simultaneous heart surgeries in June 2009. Despite medical evidence they we were excellent candidates for surgery, we experienced a harrowing journey into the dark abyss following surgery. Although Pearlman claims she has no memory of those first five days following her surgery, she wrote her first poem about the ordeal as soon as she was released from the hospital and has not stopped writing.

Like me, she also was compelled to assiduously read her entire 500 plus page hospital medical history. For sure, the need to understand what happened is grounded in most illness narratives and often rendered in graphic metaphors. I recall reading what the poet doctor, Rafael Campo wrote, “that poetry locates us inside the experience of illness, demanding that we consider it from within, as attentively as we do from without.”

In the preface to her published collection of poems, The Fix Is In, she painfully writes.

” On June 1, 2009 I had open-heart surgery for a congenital heart valve problem. I was told it would most likely be a fairly routine surgery…as I was being brought out of the anesthesia my blood pressure crashed to zero. Routine turned to nightmare.”

Like so many others who have had their near brush with death, she also discovered the need, to make sense of her heart event and to chronicle the anguish, pain and recovery as part of a patient’s journey. Acclaimed Narrative Medicine evangelists like Dr. James Pennebaker and Dr. Rita Charon, have written extensively about the corresponding health benefits associated with forming a story or writing a poem.

Below is one of Pearlman’s poems included in her anthology. I publish it with her permission and that of the publisher, Finishing Line Press.

Critical

by Tish Pearlman

She knows well that

they were in a panic

because she was falling steadily

drowning

into darkness. Zero means

her heart stopped,

her pulse was nowhere.

Did she see the ending?

Did she see the sky, trees

against the light?

Did she arrive just in

time at their beck and call

and call and call?

Did they twist her into

shape- dance around her

final breath?

Did they scream, no, come

back, come back!

Did the tunnel reveal a

light?

Did she rise

swiftly from free fall?

Did they say, yes, yes, she

is alive, she’s come from

the darkness, she’s surfaced,

the spark of her caught fire

she arrived back

she arrived back, here.

Did she say anything about

the return trip?

Did she? Did she?

Did she ask, was she asked

can you ask, did you ask?

Was her awakening by consent?

Did she sign the papers?

Did she have enough info?

Did she meet with you before with a

question?

Are you pleased that she came

through your revolving door of

drugs and panic? Is this

a save? Yours? Hers?

In due time will she ask many more

questions? Will she see the

evolution

the devolution

the sinking, the stirring

the god damn,

the fuck, the idiot,

the dropped soul

upon the table in the sterile

light

wheeled away

in critical but stable condition

wheeled away

in critical but stable condition

connected to the idea

of reprieve?

But the heart heard the

whispers. The heart. Heard.

The. Whispers.

August 14, 2009

Medical Students Engage Illness Narratives in Webinars

As the year draws to a close, I want to share some details about the impressive American Medical Student Association’s Medical Humanities Scholars Program. A few weeks ago, I joined the conversation in an “Illness Narratives” webinar facilitated by the energetic Aliye Runyan, who shares her AMSA supported MHSP duties with her medical student association colleagues, Gabriela Magda and Maggie Reid Schneider.

For sure, these are busy and stressed medical students. This is especially true for Aliye Runyan, a fourth year medical student, who is scheduled to graduate in 2012 from the University of Miami Medical School, where she plans to specialize as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

I met her last April at The Examined Life Conference supported by the University of Iowa Writing Program and Carver College of Medicine.This noteworthy three-day conference focused on the links between the science of medicine and the art of writing.

In an e-mail, the future doctor informs me that she “founded the AMSA Medical Humanities Scholars Program in 2008 to provide a much needed outlet for humanities education within medical education.” Turning a page from her mentor, Dr. Rita Charon, Runyan joins an increasing number of physician writers who are now writing their prose and poems.

It is very encouraging to hear these future doctors express their interest in learning to read stories and to listen to patients. At a time when doctors have less and less time to spend with patients, poems and stories matter now more than ever. There is increasing agreement among physicians that every patient’s story, whether it be through the admission report, the medical chart, or the arc of an entire life history, is a valued narrative. After all, the patient approaches the physician with one simple question, “My story is broken. Can you fix it?”

In our recently held web conference, participants like Junzi Shi, a first year medical student at the University of Cincinnati, joined others engaging in thoughtful responses to one of the assigned readings. I had sent out an e-mail encouraging students to read Meghan O’ Rourke’s “Story’s End” published in The New Yorker. In the essay, the author poignantly expresses her grief for her mother’s death.

Shi, born in Lanzhou, China, says that she joined MHSP ” to learn about the role that patients’ illness narratives play in their healing process. ”

Others like Sarah Selem, a first-year medical student at the University of Miami School of Medicine is enthusiastic
about participating in the Medical Humanities Scholars Program since it deepens her understanding about how science and the humanities can be used in medicine to care for others.

From the conversations and responses shared with these students, it seems that they do understand that medicine is both an art and science. By exploring medicine through the prose and poems of patients, all of us gain insight into the nature of the human condition, of suffering, of renewal and sometimes of transformation.

All this seems very encouraging since AMSA has over 150 chapters in medical schools across the country and as many as 350 pre-med chapters. This translates into more than 68,000 members, including medical and premedical stuents, residents and practicing physicians.

Certainly there appears increasing interest among medical educators to help both experienced physicians and medical students approach the challenges and at times, conflicts between patient care and health system demands. While the study and integration of literature or the place of story in the medical curriculum does not provide all the answers, it does complement and enhance better medicine.

Send me your story.

Healing Power of Poetry

Poet Joan Baranow

Poet Joan Baranow and her husband, Dr. David Watts have been engaged in collaborative projects on the power of healing through words for years. Joan Baranow’s poem, “Lumpectomy” was recently recognized as one of the winners (Honorable Mention) in a recently held Medicine & Metaphors writing event coordinated with support from the South Carolina Humanities Council and the Sumter County Cultural Commission.

Baranow, an English professor teaches at the Dominican University in San Rafael. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Western Journal of Medicine and elsewhere.

She was a producer along with her husband and others of Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine, an inspiring program on the poetry of illness and recovery. From that site, the producers write, ” poetry serves to remind us of the spiritual mission of medicine.” In the more than 100 prose and poetry submissions received in our Medical Humanities event, I am more than convinced of the efficacy of metaphors in medicine.

Below is Joan’s poem.

Lumpectomy

by Joan Baranow

The moon is a little dented tonight
on the right side
where an arm would be
pressing,
and that’s natural
to the moon
as well as certain situations—
a word gets slivered off,
a cup chips its lip—
and accidents,
like standing up into
a harder substance
than your head.
Soon, though, the moon
regains her whole,
there’s repair
to blood and hair
where force
asserted its fact,
and bone builds
within its cracks
denser deposits.
Every form exhibits
the seams of what was
torn or taken or lost.
Lovely
the life left
with its stitches.
Even this night
tucked between granite peaks
receives from a surface
slightly skewed
a bruised
yet no less emphatic
radiance.

The Surgeon’s Heart

Poet Cathleen Cuppett

Scripture clearly teaches us that the real issues of life are spiritual and are really matters of the heart. Maybe it’s for this reason the word “heart” is found so many times in the Bible. As a former heart patient, I am aware of heartache and blessings associated with life and love. My 5 year-old grandson, Eli is a miracle worker in his own right since he has helped heal the hearts of many in our blended extended family. He reminds me each time I see him how easy it is to express unconditional love with an open heart.

Cathleen Cuppett’s poem, “the surgeon’s heart,”an award winning poem from the 1st annual Medical Humanities writing event, offers a patient-side glimpse of her experience with unexpected surgery.

“I was amazed that the scars left behind were so tiny,” said Cuppett. “Dr. Bannister was the surgeon, and I wrote the poem to honor his work and that of the surgical team.”

Cathy’s beautifully crafted poem appeals to me for its aesthetic quality but also because the scar on my chest from heart surgery serves as a daily reminder of my own brush with death. She is a Spanish Professor at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina.

Here is her poem.

the surgeon’s art
for Dr. B. and the surgical team

the signature, a tiny line 
the human canvas bears the sign 
of work invisible but fine
the strokes are bold, precise and clean 
yet must this masterpiece unseen lie veiled beneath the flesh pristine
this art – no florid, frescoed wall -
 the surgeon serves a harder call
 and strives to leave no trace at all

Send me your story or poem.