By Margot Cameron

On top of the overgrown milkweed, a single monarch
butterfly searches for a bloom, or nibbles on the leaf, or
perhaps deposits one egg.
Seeing the butterfly gives me hope.
One butterfly, one scraggly milkweed, one egg, one
caterpillar becoming one more butterfly to float on the wind
and begin again and again and again.

Margot Cameron, a retired psychiatric nurse, finds joy in the simple miracles right outside her window.

By Denise B. Graves

January 2020 biopsy

What’s the verdict?

You have CANCER

We don’t have cancer in our family!

What’s next

GynOnc will call

March 4th Hysterectomy

Lymph node metastasis!

Covid-19 pandemic

CT Scan

Chemotherapy

You need to be EXTRA careful

Radiation Therapy

More Chemotherapy

Another CT Scan

November – You’re NED – for now

See you in three months

Denise Graves is a Research Assistant at UAMS and has dabbled in poetry from time to time.

By Eric Moorehead

I imagine myself visiting a lab. While there, I probed into the psyche – if there ever was one – of a coronavirus.

Speaking from the other side of the in vitro glass, I told it that your relatives infected three U.S. senators – one Republican, one Democrat, one Independent. 

Response? Either “Nonpartisan” or just silence – not sure.  

Eric Moorehead has been an administrator for the Institutional Review Board, Department of Research and Administration, since 2002. Like many others, he’s looking forward to a return to normal life in his adopted home state.  

By Paulette Mehta

I sit in the back office seeing patients through a video camera, safe. My patient arrives. I ask him questions. I ask him to feel for enlarged lymph nodes, swelling, tenderness, and more. We reach a diagnosis and a plan. All is done but the human touch is missing. The pandemic has stolen this too.  

Dr. Paulette Mehta is Professor of Hematology/Oncology and Editor-in-Chief of Medicine and Meaning. She reads and writes poetry in her spare time.

By Katherine Wu

What if my grandma were still alive?

Perhaps our communication would be through a plexiglass wall.
My broken Chinese words trapped behind a mask.
Never the words “I love you”.

I didn’t yet understand that loved ones can vanish in an instant.
I had always assumed they would be with me forever.
I was wrong

Katherine Wu is a premedical student at Rice University and wrote this work as a reminder to cherish the loved ones around us.