Listen*: Poet’s Commentary: “I wrote The Other Man Was Me during a break I had between my third and fourth years of medical school. It was a time in my …
The Distant Moon
Listen*: Transcript: I. Admitted to the hospital again. The second bout of pneumocystis back In January almost killed him; then, He’d sworn to us he’d die at home. He baked …
Tender Mercies
Listen*: Transcript: Reading I: I want to read you one short scene in which we see how repulsed he [Dan, Laura’s husband] is by the apparatus that he thinks has …
The Stethoscope
Listen*: Transcript: Through it, over young women’s tense abdomens, I have heard the sound of creation and, in a dead man’s chest, the silence before creation began. Should I pray …
Pathology of Colours
Listen*: Transcript: I know the colour rose, and it is lovely, but not when it ripens in a tumour; and healing greens, leaves and grass, so springlike, in limbs that …
Case History
Listen*: Transcript: ‘Most Welshmen are worthless, an inferior breed, doctor.’ He did not know I was Welsh. Then he praised the architects of the German death-camps– did not know I …
Carnal Knowledge
Listen*: Transcript: 1 You, student, whistling those elusive bits of Schubert when phut, phut, phut, throbbed the sky of London. Listen: the servo-engine cut and the silence was not the …
Tumbleweed
Listen*: Transcript: Took him 28 years to pick up that pack of cigarettes. One night my father re-appears in a phlegmy voice from Sunny Farms in California. When I arrive, …