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Poem: “It Could Be Worse”
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Visions Under the Serviceberry Tree
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Heroines of the Reformation
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The Revenge of the Fox Spirit
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Merelots: Armenia’s Day of the Dead
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Tights
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Food Is Not Magic
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How the Opioid Epidemic Changed My Life
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The Manosphere and Me
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The Myth of the Nature Cure
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The Vaccine Wars
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What Is Health?
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Chronically Healthy, Chronically Ill
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Against Self-Optimization
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What My First Psychiatric Patient Taught Me
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The Faces of the Bhopal Disaster
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The Return of the Family Doctor
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Abraham’s Warring Children
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A Disabled Savior
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In Pursuit of Homefulness
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In Defense of Pint and Pipe
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Health Is Belonging
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In Deep Water off Antarctica
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What Families with Autistic Children Know
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Desire, Use, Repeat
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Healing at Annoor
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The Exploitation of Immigrant Care Workers
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Growing Roots in Portugal
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Orthodox Stonemasonry
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Little Person, Big Welcome
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The Repentance of Bartolomé de las Casas
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Poem: “On the Staten Island Ferry”

The mayor, I think, had it trucked in—this stump
Of an ancient olive tree. The muscled torso
In torsion like some wrestling Greek hero’s
Statue found without its limbs—a lump
Of twisted xylem. For years I thought it dead—
Why had they planted a dead stump? The daisies
Sprang up around it in sunny waves. Taxis
Flowed on either side of the traffic island
It was marooned on like a shipwrecked mast.
And then, last spring, a crown of pale green shoots
Came arrowing out of it—I was flabbergasted,
It seemed a miracle! Now it’s going gangbusters,
Branches in all directions. It’s like the bed
The hero came home to, that he’d built himself,
And his wife had wept for years on like a life raft,
And the wonder wasn’t that it was not moved—
(An inside joke)—but that it was still alive.

Georges Braque, Olive Trees, oil on canvas, 1907. Artwork by Georges Braque on WikiArt (public domain).
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