ERIC TRAN

Origin Story

There’s a certain kind I think we’re supposed to propagate
about medicine: the fascination with an injured butterfly, 

I heard a classmate say, or because a loved one died
too soon. I hear a splash of blood is delicious bait, so here: 

once my dad smashed his toenail under a car at work
and made me pry the dead thing off; I looked away 

only at first. Is this the story, or when the hood flew off 
and into his windshield on the 101? Last week 

he set a wet rag over my car’s battery terminals 
and said, They’re gonna corrode all the time, just clean 

what you can. Last year I insisted he tell me
when he or mom gets injured. I said, No more 

surprise splints greeting me when I come home
to visit and of course I don’t want to know

or imagine walking into that house without one
or the other of them, a night spent there without

the harmonics of familial snoring. Like how as a kid
I thought bodies were just sacks of unbound blood,

so I swaddled every cut immediately, to save myself
and forget I could bleed at all. I still wear Band-Aids too long, 

but my patients’ wounds catch me in a chess match—
and what joy, snuck through the ticks of the clock’s hands,

in that extra, tiny pocket of my jeans, of living next 
door to my fear and not always closing the front door

because some days the breeze is the right kind of frosty
and carries with it a small bit of jasmine.

Eric Tran is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC. He is the winner of the  Autumn House Press Emerging Writer's contest and the author of The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer. He is also the author of the chapbooks Revisions and Affairs with Men in Suits. His work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.