Poetry
Remnants
Zephyr Hameem
Sleep seeps through the mind like a slow death,
and sunrises bring suffocation. You won’t make it out
whole, but you wonder how many pieces are left for others
to take. Cold rains disappear into the stifling heat,
tendrils of muscle ignite and you feel fibers disconnecting.
With each tear, a memory dies and you find yourself farther,
farther from the person you used to be, want to be,
only to find that this new skin is lonely, this new brain
atrophied, this new face faceless. The world burns,
taking voice after voice after voice, and you realize
that being taught to dream was a cruel lesson. Fire
slowly takes the place of blood, of care. Soot stains your hands
and sacrifice gnaws from the inside out, wakes you up.
There is nobody to hear you cry. You go back to sleep,
your fingers curled around my hand, disintegrating in my arms.
And I am left to kiss the remnants of your forehead,
to stain my lips with ashes, because all I can do is remember you.
Author: Zephyr Hameem
Bio: Zephyr Hameem is a fourth-year medical student at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate education at Saint Louis University, where she studied Neuroscience and Creative Writing, and later earned her M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Hameem was a recipient of the A.J. Montesi Award for Creative Work for her poetry in 2021, and her works have appeared in The Kiln Project and Ripple Magazine. An earnest advocate of exploring creativity in medicine, she is an editorial intern for Tendon Magazine and a poetry editor for Ripple Magazine. Outside of school, she can be found reading, slowly working through her Letterboxd watch list, or playing with her cat.