Hello everybody, and welcome to the second issue of TBE. Hopefully finals went well for everybody, and you are now free to relax and enjoy the creative work of some of your classmates. We have some great entries this issue! Now for news:
1.) Whether you are traveling or volunteering abroad this summer or exploring your own hometown, take lots of pictures so we can put together a photo issue in September!
2.) Start thinking about memories that really stick out from your first year! For the incoming first years, we'll be putting out an issue at the beginning of August, and we would love to have people submit short (less than 300 word) stories about their "welcome to med school" moments. They can be funny, embarrassing, sad or all of the above. Deadline August 1st!
3.) New in this issue, TBE posted each entry individually to encourage reader comments on each submission.
-NEIL and AARON
Thursday, June 23, 2011
ii.1
ANCESTORS
BY ANNIE JACOBSEN
Mother,
A golden thread
Looping in and out of darkness.
Your bones, heart, skin and breasts
Have died and been reborn,
This body is your testament.
From where did I arise
With these million voices on my lips,
A siphon of your consciousness?
At night we dream of each other
Like holding mirror to mirror,
Eclipse.
ii.2
NEW GLASS
BY ANONYMOUS
I remember asking my mom that night “can’t we call someone and tell them to make it stop? How about the President or the Pope?”
I was eleven years old and I had just felt the earth shudder and watched the hills explode in flames as bombs were dropped on my country. I call it“mine” because once someone tries to destroy something dear to you, you can’t help but call it your own and try to tug it back from their reach. But when has land ever belonged to any person?
The sound of bombs dropping kept me up all night and my stomach was tied in knots as I curled up between my parents on the floor. The question I posed to my mom remains with me till this day because I spent that sleepless night mulling it over. Over and over I thought about who I wanted to call and yell at – who I wanted to call and cry to and beg to and plead to make it stop - and continuously I came up blank.
My gut instinct till that point had always been to reach for my parents when I felt threatened but there they were, beside me on the floor; and tremors rippled through that floor all night long.
That night I was confronted with forces that I didn’t know existed and didn’t know how to resolve. They were dark and beyond my understanding but would forever change the way I saw the world and would ultimately shape the way I understood the concept of justice. But what’s an eleven year old to do with justice?
I kept my eyes open all night but my nightmare was reality.
As dawn broke I woke with my mom and walked with her towards the living room in silence. She grabbed a broom and started sweeping. As the light of a new day forced its way between the clouds, she answered my question before I had to ask: “we can’t put it back together, but we can buy new glass.”
ii.3
ARM WRESTLING
BY ANONYMOUS
BY ANONYMOUS
“Watch him. Watch how he pulls his arm closer and leans in so he can win.”
He taught us to arm wrestle early. He taught us that the secret was in not the size of the muscles or our stamina; it was technique. Even when we were 10, we all had a hand at trying to beat my grandfather at arm wrestling. When my two cousins, Andy and Henry, were 18, they finally beat my 70 year old grandfather. At that point, he retired from the business of teaching us the art of arm wrestling and it then became our responsibility to share the secret with our younger cousins.
Arm wrestling was among one of the many skills he taught us. It wasn’t until we were older that our parents told us he also knew the secret to growing, roasting, and making coffee, but that was before he came to the United States. That was before any of us had been born.
When he was young, communism in China had forced him to escape to Vietnam and work from the ground up to re-establish himself. Several years later he married my grandmother and had six children. He taught himself how to grow and roast coffee beans and created a successful business selling coffee in Vietnam. Not many years later, communists in Vietnam took away his home and business forcing him to once again leave everything behind and escape to the United States in hopes of a better and safer future for his family.
This time, he was already in his late 40s and was tired of trying. Twice now, he had lost everything he had worked for. For the rest of his life, he spent his time watching the children and grandchildren as they grew. Even though he never shared his secret for making coffee with us, he taught us that hard-work could get us anywhere we wanted to go in life.
He had had two heart bypass surgeries and I knew when I left for medical school I did not have much time with him left. On my last visit, I told him “I’m not coming home for two more months Grandpa.” And everything in me wanted to scream, I’m afraid I won’t see you again.
“Two months passes quickly. Don’t worry.” I know and that’s why I’m scared. I’m not ready for you to go. There is so much we haven’t talked about.
“Just study hard,” he said. And in the silence that followed, I knew he understood that I was saying good-bye.
One month later, he passed away in the comfort of his own home with all of his children by his side. Every part of me says I wish I had one more minute with him, but I know we have said our goodbyes. I miss you Grandpa and I’m scared of all time that I have to sacrifice with my family to become a doctor.
ii.4
COMMON PATHWAYS
BY JAVIER CABRERA PÉREZ
In our dreams I was a fool
in search of a missing fibula and you
were a failed superhero in need of
newtonian mechanics.
We met in a clandestine location,
a small bar about to close,
and discussed the possibility
of finding bones with parabolic
equations.
Kissing in the street corner
we approached each other
as spiral galaxies in eternal rotation.
our years of walking in tightropes
and creaking floorboards
fell behind, and the pain
from dislocated shoulders
(past encounters in the wrong hearts)
was dissipated by the warmth
of our bodies in your apartment
near the outskirts of Cambridge.
I wished I had been there before
to percuss your chest,
listen for breath sounds,
caress the small of your back.
You translated my babbling
(as a polyglot of my brainspeak)
through similar neuronal impulses,
common pathways for tragedy and romance.
You said, would you believe pulsars
are keeping time so well?
here is proof that some things can have a frequency,
the way souls can have frequencies,
and that maybe we are two pulsars
between extremes of dark matter
flashing at the same speed.
In the Boston museum my electrons
transferred weight between my nose
and yours, which confirmed our hypothesis
of being repellent magnetic fields,
not because of being opposites
but simply because of sharing smaller particles,
things too small for the average person
to comprehend unless delirious
or in love.
I have said to you how I wished
I could rewrite all my poems to you,
but the truth is that the most important
poems I have will always be in my dreams,
which, as we already know, you occupy
as a superhero of physics.ii.5
THE SEMICOLON
BY AARON CROSBY
So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my education recently, and I think every experience I’ve ever had was just an iteration of high school English, and if I had to be even more specific and pick one single lesson, one shining gem of dogmatism that so perfectly encapsulates every scrap of information I’ve ever forcibly shoved into my brain it would be the day that How To Use a Semicolon wafted through hormone laden clouds to lodge between my ears, for as a good student I began to incorporate it into my writing; closely related phrases were juxtaposed without the thought-wall that is the period intervening; in fact, I liked to use semicolons most with transitions and adverbs, although sometimes I liked to use it for really long lists of nouns, verbs or adjectives; or, more commonly, for ones containing lots of commas which would be confusing without my new friend, the semicolon; however, the faster I began to hand in papers containing semicolons, the faster they came back covered in red circles with admonitions like “use a period” scrawled in the margins, and as I grew increasingly frustrated, I began to realize that sometimes we are taught things so that we may be taught we are wrong, and that even though to one teacher it may be grammatically correct to begin a sentence with a conjunction and to use a semicolon in your writing, there’s some expert, somewhere who thinks it is an affront to the English language, and that sometimes, when you decide to flex your muscles and are fed up with authority’s opinion of absolute right and absolute wrong, it is necessary to break all sorts of other people’s rules in the course of writing a 300 word essay consisting of a single sentence.
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