The Gobi Desert is dry because monsoons get sieved in the Himalayas. Mountains can block clouds, peak so high rain can’t climb them, leaving one side verdant and sopped, the other crumbling and camel-sore. My patient is waiting on another biopsy. His wife rests her hand on my waist when I am in the room, I think to stay anchored to someone whose body is not jungle rot. They ask me the origins of the pain because a reason can make survivable that which should be screamed. I want to explain, but can only find the words, “cancer can eat bone from the inside out, making grits in its effort to become.” In silence I wrap my arms around the wife, whose small frame disappears into mine like a city doused in fog.

Maya J. Sorini, is a narrative medicine scholar, medical student, and award-winning poet. Her first collection, The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den, won the 2023 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Maya currently attends Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and lives in Bergen County with her grandmother.