POETRY

INTIMA FALL-WINTER 2026-27

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A Season of Living | Isabelle Li

Lessons in dying—told by a grandfather and observed by a granddaughter—can be found in the life cycle of the silkworm.

Case Study: The Effect of Clinical Rhetoric on Patient Prognosis | Yuliya Vayner

Language takes on a life of its own when zeroing in on mental health. “Somewhere in a journal, someone has already estimated the number of years you have left.”

Day Drawing Down | Irene Sherlock

A therapist is left with everything a client is carrying when she closes the door.

Diagnoses | Tyler Fair

Connecting the dots: A chaplain trainee encounters a hapless recognition at a bus stop.

Diagnostics | Kristine Crane

Where does the mind go when first hearing a diagnosis?

Exit; Stage 4 | Joan Hill

The play has finished, the actor not granted a graceful goodbye: Choosing to remember M at home, on his porch, in springtime.

Heart Murmur | Serena Choi Fernandopulle

Listening to an auscultated arrhythmia is not unlike hearing the motion of the waves, long ago, in the ocean.

Hope for a Lie | Overbeck Christian Takou Mbah

When an elderly Vietnamese woman asks what is wrong with her, this doctor can only tell the truth.

In A Macular Degenerating World | JC Williams

What do birds sound and feel like when sight is diminished?

It's the Last Month of Junior Residency in the Cardiothoracic ICU | Joey Lew

A trainee shows reverence for the strongest patients—and people—she has met while in training.

McPherson Square Trilogy | Andrew Murdock

Observations by a volunteer working with a street medicine clinic in Kensington, Philadelphia, a community profoundly affected by homelessness and the opioid epidemic.