Regarding Fermi’s Paradox

Laker Thrasher UW Hospital 2024 Poem   On what I can only assume was a beautiful day Enrico Fermi proposed a problem that everyone understood a cosmic ouroboros head to tail, beginning to end the eternal return to the infernal question: Are we alone in the universe? And we’ll spend the rest of our lives…

January 31, 2025

A.C. Mapes School of Medicine and Public Health 2025 Poem   Days after the deep freeze, we watched a snowdrop try to bloom.   Its petals were sheer and brittle, its flower open, but barely. Wind-beaten, tired, guarded—   I knew the feeling.   The cold pinched color back into my cheeks, but our arms…

hallway rendezvous

Andrea Gilmore Bykovskyi School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Emergency Medicine 2023 Poem   beneath your despair and my anticipation we are both watching the same silent film: the end of an era. every death is new but the dance familiar you question, I gesture. I have a lot of important words for…

Transplanted (Four-Chambered)

Daniel Rortvedt, OTD, OTR/L Department of Kinesiology, Occupational Therapy 2024 Poem   For John  What’s built around us is affordance. A state of matter. An ice cube before it’s frozen. A mitral valve blushing into the left ventricle alongside the Allegheny River roiling over at breakneck speed. Can you fathom the distance between somewhere else and here…

An Incantation for Spring

A.C. Mapes School of Medicine and Public Health 2022 Poem   Bloodroot, liverwort, wild ginger serve as a salve, balm, tonic, elixir. Forget Wellbutrin, won’t take Effexor— no chemical’ll solve a long, harsh winter. Sunshine brings a natural cure: watch purple fists of rue-anemone unfurl. Bloodroot, liverwort, wild ginger please be the salve, balm, tonic,…