Help You
By Fae Kayarian
The exam room is cold and sterile,
barren
You sit there, shaking or panting,
sobbing
And I come to your side, put my pen down,
lab coat away
How can I help you,
how can I help you?
barren
You sit there, shaking or panting,
sobbing
And I come to your side, put my pen down,
lab coat away
How can I help you,
how can I help you?
Last night, I needed
help too.
I saw babies who never lived, parents who never held.
There were wounded men never healed, scars cut short of
forming.
Last night, I looked at myself
and couldn’t see myself.
All I saw were starved bodies, lacerated wrists
ghosts of people.
How can I help you
when I can’t even help myself?
I see it in the others too, in their faces
their mouths.
The way surgeons scrub in, nurses talk,
techs take vitals.
Gloved hands reach out to us,
dripping and unraveling.
We accept those hands with our own
bleeding fingers.
We are broken as we fix
the broken.
Forgive me, but I must ask:
How can I help you
and help myself too?
Fae Kayarian resides in Boston, Massachusetts where she is an undergraduate student enrolled in the Behavioral Neuroscience program at Northeastern University. She is also a clinical research student at the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. In her free time, she loves to bike in Boston rush hour traffic, hammock along the Charles River Esplanade and explore city sushi venues in the endless search for Boston’s best maki roll.