Bend
Andrea Chin
You won’t know when it starts, becomes too much at once,
Words keep rushing forward, images, questions, content.
They’ll speak the truths you try not to acknowledge
That it might not work, but it has to in the end.
You may even cry at a counter where they’re trying to cook dinner,
Keep working, breathing, and forgiving yourself.
Bend, don’t break.
News headlines and rumors will cross oceans to become reality.
Learn what textures lie flat across your cheeks, which fog your glasses,
How to store them, when to toss them, how to even get them.
Hold tighter to the few faces with noses and lips you are so privileged to see.
Practice your zoom face, curate space, take yourself off mute,
This becomes routine and you’ll make it through.
Just bend, this will pass, don’t break.
When ‘I can’t breathe’ fills the air around you,
You’ll feel a deep ache in the middle, as your soul despairs.
The system built by oppressors works well, just caught on candid camera today.
Fresh dew off the grass will seep to your knees as you hold your fist high,
Tears dashing quickly to cross the space between your eyes and your cheeks,
Running behind your masks seen and unseen.
Bend harder, you can’t let this break you.
As the world drags its feet, you’ll do as you’re told.
The news will scream about numbers and cases and bleach until
The leaves start to fall, and the world becomes red and blue.
Every day of spewed rhetoric and theorized numbers drags on,
More states added to a list of those to never step foot into.
And when ‘Biden won’ is finally shouted, it’ll all feel worth it.
Keep bending, don’t let this break us.
As furtive glances turn to you and the comments to brush off keep rising,
Laugh with your eyes because your lips are busy holding back screams.
You will feel phantom scrapes of gravel on your palms and knees,
As if it was you who had been shoved in the back.
Your eyes will overflow, swollen for the elders you’ve never known.
Weep in relief yours are overseas, safe from this country, these people.
Don’t stop bending, you can’t break now.
Bend,
Don’t break.
Bend.
And when you are all done with bending,
Can you untangle yourself?
How many times do you bend
Until the tangles become knots?
Or do you stay bent,
In this new shape of who you are?
Each memory a knot of your fabric.
Andrea Chin is a rising fourth-year medical student applying to Family Medicine residencies this fall. She looks forward to the increased freedom of fourth-year and spending more time dancing, baking, reading, playing video games, and having DnD adventures with her friends. This poem was written as a reflection on her experiences throughout her third year of medical school during times of racial injustice, political change, and a global pandemic.
