In emergency settings, how do clinicians show empathy for patients and their families, yet maintain a healthy emotional distance? In Yara Abou-Hamde’s poem “How the Emergency Shift Will Go” (Fall 2020 Intima), a physician views a patient’s ultrasound report, which contains a tragic, “unexpected result.”

Forgetting, for a moment, about the COVID-19 pandemic, the physician touches the patient’s shoulder with an ungloved hand and reveals that her pregnancy is ectopic. The physician is deeply affected by the patient’s grief: “Your mask will make me acutely aware of your eyes, the sadness magnified so many folds, it will swallow me whole.”

Indeed, at the end of the emergency shift, the physician, while fading to sleep, visualizes the patient’s sorrow: “it’s your eyes I will see when I finally close mine.” Does the physician, in empathizing with the patient, absorb too much emotional pain? Does empathy here blur with sympathy—a shared feeling of loss? How do clinicians carry on their vital work without bearing the grief of patients and their families, yet still comfort them?

My poem “Triage” (Fall 2020 Intima ) also explores the complex emotion of empathy and its element of distance. In the emergency room, a father watches doctors examine his son, who broke his C2 vertebra. The father, who is frightened and exhausted, listens to them debate the nature of the injury: “Orthopedic? Neurological? Do you concur?” He is offered no clarity in this potentially life-altering moment. The doctors squeeze his son’s limbs, asking, “Can you feel this?”—which begs the question of what the doctors feel. Meanwhile, a social worker speaks to the father, and he remembers only her “oddly knowing” smile–“a line blurring joy and grief.” Does the social worker’s conflicted expression reflect a strange yet necessary fusion: a blend of her personal happiness, which is resistant to others’ sadness, with empathy for the father and son? Is there, at times, a tension between empathy and authenticity?

Daniel Ginsburg earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from American University. Discover more about his work @danielhginsburg on Instagram and Twitter. His poem “Triage” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima. — Daniel Ginsburg earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from American University. Discover more about his work @danielhginsburg on Instagram and Twitter. His poem “Triage” appears in the Fall 2020 *Intima.*

Daniel Ginsburg earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from American University. His poetry has been published in The Northern Virginia Review (Vol. 34, Spring 2020) and American Literary Magazine (Spring 2017). His poem “Black Snake Coiled in My Black Leather Sofa” is forthcoming in the 2020 issue of Gargoyle Magazine (Vol. 73), while his poem “Multiplier” will appear in The American Journal of Poetry (Vol. 10) on New Year’s Day, 2021. His English translations of Hebrew poetry by Israeli poet Shira Stav were published in Pleiades: Literature in Context (Vol. 37, Issue 1, Winter 2016). He lives in Potomac, Maryland. Discover more about his work @danielhginsburg on Instagram and Twitter. His poem “Triage” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.