Narrative Medicine Monday: Heartbeats

In honor of World AIDS Day yesterday, today’s Narrative Medicine Monday will be a poem by Melvin Dixon, recently highlighted by poets.org. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon sets a staccato cadence that reveals the evolution of a disease.

At the start of the poem, the narrator is the picture of good health: “Work out. Ten laps….Eat right. Rest well.” Then, he notes the “Hard nodes. Beware.” Dixon achieves an astonishing flow, given each sentence is just two syllables. The reader is forced to stop and consider the weight, the gravity of the situation that deepens, even as the lines remain short.

Dixon is able to convey the medicine with simple, ordinary words: “Reds thin. Whites low.” There is a turn in the poem with the narrator showing resolve: “Get mad. Fight back.” In this moment, he repeats previous lines found during times of health: “Call home. Rest well.”

The focus then shifts to the mechanics of the body, the breath: “Breathe in. Breathe out. / No air. No air.” Time becomes fluid, altered when one is sick, one is dying: “Six months? Three weeks?… Today? Tonight?” I find that I am holding my breath as I finish Dixon’s poem. I immediately look him up, knowing the likely outcome but hoping it will end differently just the same.

Writing Prompt: Try writing a poem about an illness or health challenge from diagnosis to treatment in short fragmented sentences, like Dixon’s “Heartbeats.” Consider diabetes or cancer, dialysis or pregnancy. How does the limitation of short sentences crystallize the situation? Alternatively, think of a moment you’ve shared, either personal or in a healthcare setting, with a patient with HIV or AIDS in the 1980s or 90s. Write this scene as it occurred during that time period, then reimagine the same scene in a modern setting. What changes, what remains the same? Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine Monday: The Game of Catch

Noah Stetzer’s poem “The Game of Catch” is featured in the current issue of the Bellevue Literary Review as well on Poetry Daily. Stetzer begins by describing an “idyllic” game of catch, then expands his narrative, including idioms and phrases the word catch might conjure up.

As the poem progresses it becomes more intimate, more ominous, a recounting of Stetzer’s own story of “catching” from another: “in my voice, catch my breath, no-it’s when small blue flame/ignites kindling; the kind of catch that’s alone in itself the thing/one avoids…” Stetzer guides the reader through his own experience of catching an illness that, though “unexpected,” also seemed “inevitable” and ultimately leaves us with the idea that this is a game we all play.

Writing Prompt: Take another word commonly used in medicine: treat, contract, mass, inject. Think of all the other ways this word is used, in idioms or otherwise. What is surprising or illustrative about the words we use in illness and health? Alternatively, think of a time you “caught” a disease from another person. Maybe it was a stranger or someone you knew intimately. Did you feel, as Stetzer did, that it was “unexpected” but also “inevitable?” Write for 10 minutes.

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