Mehta 2026 - Poetry

By: Courtney Ragan

Some days, there’s nowhere for the grief to go.

Ebbing in weight, with a pull that does not spare,

It lingers, circling below.

Five stages with sharp peaks and still plateaus.

A mirage of acceptance humming in the air.

Some days, there’s nowhere for the grief to go.

Like rotten fruit, it hangs low,

Forming a soaked-in stain the wearer is unaware.

It lingers, circling below.

Memories deep and pulling like an undertow,

Treading waves of emotions caged in despair.

Some days, there’s nowhere for the grief to go.

It washes and defines all that you know,

Planted roots of happier seasons anchor and repair, yet there It lingers, circling below.

Lurking and shifting like a shadow,

Enveloping those left behind without a care,

Some days, there’s nowhere for the grief to go; It lingers, circling below.

Author Bio: Ms. Courtney Reagan has a Masters in Education and is an instructor in the in the writing center and the Education and Student Success Center at UAMS. She loves to write.

By: Safi Alsebai

What is a paradox in English as in
any other language I speak or have ever spoken?

What is a paradox since fingerpulp could see
and speak together? Everything
in the “and,” apparently.

Her surgery was uncomplicated and
a kidney transplant,
for what it’s worth, though that’s not the
matter of
this story or its questions only the
occasion to discuss matter and mattering

Nevertheless,

I still want to say She
“peed on the table”
meaning that the kidney now “her” kidney or
“her new” kidney
began producing urine while she was still
under as soon
as blood flow was patent

She had been making less urine less
than her sister for three years
less than her mother and
less than her cousin

Now, since her new organ has become
engorged like her other organs
and like other family affairs
she has already “made 1.2 liters” in eight hours

Something people were keeping track of:
they arrived
at dusk and then throughout the day to check
how much she had drunk and how much she
had urinated

Dusk makes it sound like I want you
to sentimentalize this I only mean
the fact of 4:30am
and the fact that she was thirsty from
urination and nauseous from drinking

In her dreams here she will mind the gap
and be on television
as a result of the static of various acrylic
fibers flush against one another

Like her nurse who will be interviewed on
television in a couple of weeks
by a local news anchor
about the nursing strike All three
will wear the same color on their nails

On television, where every building has
collapsed during her recovery
and everyone has been killed and the
world continues to ravage and
be ravaged by what has marked her and
sutured her
and where Bette Davis stars in

A Marked Woman and the next night
in her dream she will star alongside her
in a film where she finds a YouTube video of
her own surgery with 0 views

In the film, one finger crosses over another
She was on a muscle relaxant for
They had
opened her right side
obliquely,
and corseted it shut, and came to run
their fingers along the sutures twice daily

They filled the empty space-between with
laughter when they did not know with
what else to fill it
or with what else to fill themselves,
and she wondered where they learned to
laugh like that

From their molars, and At any given
moment someone will be laughing
like a form of address At anything
she says

They ask to raise the blinds

She did not mind insulin injected into a
folded purse of tissue,
but did not like it when they cautiously called
that purse her “belly,”
which sounds like what you would call an
abdomen if you were talking
to someone you thought was stupid

Will we have her having been on dialysis
three days
out of the week
or four days? Will we also
feel her fistula for
a palpable thrill, if she has one?
Or will she have had an infected
indwelling catheter instead?

“The thrill is gone away,” swoons

a patient on the other side of the curtain
An optimistic woman who

Despite a prognosis of two or three weeks
would like to remain off hospice and
return to the operating room Singing, she
waits for a court date

Three months from now
For a trial at the end of which
may or may not lie a disability check

She is filing her nails she is filing for divorce
as she would like to be divorced
before she dies rich
And they will all have the same colored nails
All four

How much will they have to have been
through to be so accepting?
What is acceptable and what is imaginable
this late or this early
into the story of being written under
the equal sign?

How badly do they have to have
been to be nonchalant now,
when. ? Are
they even nonchalant?

What is the price of gratitude
in narrative, as in care?

A renal transplant plus its
accouterments (consultation,
follow-up, so on) in the United States,
where she got “her” new kidney
costs on average a little over four hundred
thousand dollars, depending

She would not know until she left the hospital
how
much of that she would be paying (off)
for the rest of her life, and
how
much her insurance would
Graciously cover

But it could have been
any procedure to
any organ at
any cost, under any
insurance and benefits manager
with any Grace

The relation between this story
and the discipline
of political economy (political economy as a
discipline)
is tenuous at best as tenuous as
mattering and
the conditions under which procedures occur

This is a story about tenuousness and
sinuousness

Everything here is expensive
Everything here is at a cost

It makes the people here feel good that care
is doled out this way,
unlike over There, where
it’s all too much

They love what little can be had here for the
most part

Here, where the enemy is what is too much
Habeas corpus You shall
have the body
Here is the body

That is why everything here is four
hundred thousand dollars

That is why they come here and how they got
here: A state of emergency

This is why this story is for receipt paper here

Here, meaning from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
“Here,” meaning “in the clinic”

Not the ordinary
language outpatient clinic, though that too,
where she will go every two days for lab work
once she is out of “here.”

But here, in the Birth-of-the-clinic
clinic (teaching hospital)
where the clinical encounter is made and
remade
on an everyday basis, and has
been for a few hundred years, apparently

The span of her stay here
in the clinic
is until she has made enough urine
and she is out of the timeframe for major
postoperative complications that would
make her as breathless as anyone
else as vulnerable to death as she is

As vulnerable as we have made her

The span of her stay here
in America
is until she dies. with and
from Debt,
and with and from Grace

She has to have moved her bowels
(shat), or passed gas,
eaten without vomiting (puking), walked on
her own, and
not be writhing in pain
So, three or four days, depending on
and her
cousin will bring her a new set of false
eyelashes

Her urine can be mixed with blood for these
few days
but only a little bit of blood Her urine
can be pink
No “gross” blood, meaning: The piss
can be gross, but not the blood

About the Author: Dr. Alsebai is a graduate of the UAMS College of Medicine,, class of 2026 and an internal medicine resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured in among others, the Journal for Medical Humanities, Michigan City Review of Books, The Dialogist, and others.