M. CYNTHIA CHEUNG
M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose poems can be found in The Baltimore Review, Four Way Review, Pleiades, RHINO, swamp pink, Tupelo Quarterly and others, and she is a prior Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellow. She reads for Bear Review and serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards.
In the hospital ward’s locked room, there was a faded print of a woman on horseback traveling through emptied streets. The cheap brass frame rattled on the wall each time our doctors unlocked the door. By then, our skin, too, was melting—the sheets blotted red and the pale-faced nurse consoling, You did it to save others from worse.
This violence is still happening today, and, as you allude to, perpetuated by intentional erasure of memory. I believe that examining historical context can be a contemporary form of witnessing. When we are powerless to enact social change as individuals, witnessing is one avenue of protest left to us.
October 29, 2023
