By Eli Daniel Ehrenpreis

“Who will ask me for medical advice at this wedding?”

The music wasn’t banging loudly, so this time, sitting alone and having a drink, I am able to internalize my thoughts without interruption. I want to solve their medical problems. I want to have a perfect memory. 

The exercises start: Reasoning, remembering, synthesizing…. all are functioning well. Guidelines, diagnostic hints, eponyms, treatments, adverse effects, CAM, data analysis…all there. There are the concepts that I can reach directly from inside of my head; there are the memories that are tucked away that I can rapidly retrieve. If I think for instance of the names of the wrist bones-scaphoid, lunate, trapezius, trapezoid, hamate, capitate from the mnemonic SLT your wrist-that I memorized forty years ago-they materialize when summoned. The causes of anion gap acidosis-SKUMPILE. The Chief of Medicine ranting about high output cardiac failure and destroying you if you treat it with Lasix.

Sometimes it’s hard to relax.

The regs at work don’t do this. They find me and my thoughts too distracting. Gargoyles still stare down from old buildings at me as I walk along the quad.

I once piped up that “fenugreek makes your urine smell like maple syrup” during one of those dog and pony shows for doctors; an academic type giving a lecture trashing alternative medicine; the audience eating their steaks and drinking their wine. So, when I mentioned the maple syrup, one of the regs whistled in that “anyone can look up facts like that on their phones” …and I decided not to defend myself. 

I see that this same guy is at the wedding.

After dinner, an acquaintance and I are discussing his prostate cancer, when a millennial runs into the reception hall looking for my help, because an elderly guy is standing by the bathroom saying that he isn’t feeling well.  I go to check. He’s just a drunk old doc who overdid it at the open bar. I send him home after coffee and some psychotherapy. 

In the meantime, I notice that the reg doctor from the meeting is walking away in the opposite direction so he can avoid the situation near the bathroom. 

The acquaintance with cancer sees it all. And he says to me, “That’s why people ask you for medical advice at weddings. Not him.”

Eli Daniel Ehrenpreis, M.D., started life as a musician then became a physician, educator, writer, and inventor. He stopped seeing patients due to disability. His latest book, The Mesentery in Health and Disease, was published by Springer International. His prose and poetry writing often focuses on his own experiences. He has three adult children and lives with his wife Ana and two small dogs in Skokie, Illinois.

Jean Lemonnier was born in July 1999 in Bayonne, France. Interested in notions of sciences and spirituality like the void or the inner infinity of moments in suspension, Jean aims to create fictions of alternative permanences through different mediums. In 2021, Jean degreed from the MO.CO. ESBA fine arts school based in Montpellier, France, where his practice was based on drawing, engraving, video, volume with wood and metal. He’s currently living and working in Ibaraki, Japan, where he continues his studies on the master Global Art Practice of the Tokyo University of the Arts.

By Christopher Fettes

All the world is on the wind:
Plants coming into bloom,
Distant fires burning forests and homes,
Smokestacks exhaling on the third shift,
Cities waking up and commuting,
Every scent drifts over time and space,
Heavy here in the cool, damp air of night
In the latter days of spring.

The wolfhound takes it all in,
Distracted from her purpose in the night.
I can but wonder what she perceives
Drifting through our small piece of the world,
Cutting through the heavy bouquet of honeysuckle
That predominates these few days
Before disappearing into green
In the keen light of summer.

All the world is on the wind,
Drifting past at all times,
All the while it goes unnoticed,
Perhaps merely marveled at,
This presence of imperceptible matter
Crossing great distances unseen
And unremarked upon
To find us where we are.

Christopher Fettes was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and their beloved pets. He earned both a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Central Arkansas. He writes poetry and fiction. He serves as Poetry Editor for Medicine & Meaning and is a reviewer for Slant. He is the author of a chapbook titled A Loneliness in the Distance Between.

By Stephen G. Jones

An Epic poem
My E.M.R. symphony
A Haiku haiku

Stephen G. Jones, M.D., is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Neurology at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Northwest Hospital.

By Jeff Rawlings

I could die on a day just like this
With a slant of sun casting dramatic shadows on my face
The nattering birds are finally unconcerned now the snow
Is melting into mud and their feeder is full again

Overhead an airliner full of merry makers
And desperate salesmen etches a line into the cobalt sky
She used to call them skyscrapers
Back when she could still speak of such things

I don’t want an intervention here
But the ice-laden guttering is creaking and my old dog
Is probably hungry again
And isn’t the colonoscopy next week

The sun casts a perfect glory around my face
And there’s a siren bawling in the distance
Maybe it heard me say
I could die on a day just like this

Jeff Rawlings is retired following a military stint, a long career in quality systems management, and a delightful four and a half years on the staff of the Donald W. Reynolds Library serving Baxter County. He is a 1972 U of A Fayetteville English Lit graduate, and he was most active in writing and publishing during the 1990s and early 2000s. In recent years, he has reclaimed his passion for the language and the written word. He was the poetry critic for the Poet’s Roundtable of Arkansas for the 2015-2016 term, and he is now connected with several local poets with whom he shares his scribblings and observations.

By Sahil Kapoor

The limbic system behind the game
They say it’s all in the brain,
The amygdala that is not the same,
Smaller than all, experiencing more pain!
Emotional that all arise, to understand you have to be more wise!
Hippocampus- hyperaroused always
Misinterpreting threats, uncoordinated and dysfunctional ways!
Away from reality it stays, information to amygdala it relays!
The HPA axis stays active throughout,
Cortisol that always overwhelms them out!
Prefrontal cortex inefficient, at rest,
Impulsivity at the highest!
Assailed by emotions, stress always in the frame,
Post-traumatic stress disorder is the name!!

Sahil Kapoor is a first-year resident in the Baptist Health-UAMS Psychiatry program.

By Stephen Johnson

It will, like a limb crashing-down
behind you on a wooded path,
cause you to turn, startled,

wrest from you, gasp-and-exhalation,
a replaying of things unchangeable,
and renew raw vigilance,

inspire enumerations
of co-incidence’s kindnesses,
cement old admirations,

and change you . . again, now
that change commands respect,
switching places with fear.

You renegotiate, with kindred fate,
admit your need, of one honest escort,
as you- traverse the shifting plates.

Stephen Phillip Johnson is a Mountain Home carpenter. Writing is his itch. Within the halls of medicine, where he’s been (repeatedly) healed, reside flocks of muses.

By Paulette Guerrin

Argument on hold, we sit. 
The waiting-room phone rings;

we don’t know the name. 
We’re beginning to feel like drones 

whose queen has found another colony. 
We sink deeper into our magazines 

while the TV tells us the things 
we need, as if we have forgotten.

Paulette Guerin lives in Arkansas and teaches writing, literature, and film. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, epiphany, Contemporary Verse 2, Twyckenham Notes, and others. Her debut collection Wading Through Lethe explores memory, loss, and metamorphosis in the landscapes of an Ozark Mountain childhood and travel abroad. She also has a chapbook, Polishing Silver as well as a chapbook-sized selection in the anthology Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry. Her website is pauletteguerin.com.

By Laine Derr

He’s forgotten, I hear
them whisper, what
he’s learned or loved.

I imagine I found
under a summer stone 
our last embrace, eyes 
beginning to see what  
we all will know, rain
just beyond the rise, 
I hum of evening air.

I imagine I kissed 
a flower because 
it kissed me back,
pollen touching 
the tip of my tongue 
buzzing, We will be – 

Strangers turning to go.

Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from Antithesis, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.