When John heard that conventional radiation would take six or seven weeks of daily

treatments, he knew there had to be a better way. Ultimately, he and his doctors found it:
CyberKnife radiation therapy at the number one CyberKnife center for prostate cancer in the
country: NYU Winthrop Hospital. CyberKnife is as effective as surgery, but with no pain, no
recovery period and less risk of side effects compared to other treatments.

John’s CyberKnife treatment took just five brief appointments in one week. And in no time at
all, he was back to his highenergy lifestyle.

I’ve kept but rarely use, though I did that moment When I kept telling my mother “We have to
go” With an almost impolite urgency, because I couldn’t bear One more minute in that near-
replica of the room of my childhood, Even as the woman said “He seems to be in such a hurry”
And my mother smiled, making excuses as we turned to leave, While I bemoaned my parents’
passive politeness So common in the Mexican in America, though by then I was already a grad
student in upstate New York And down in South Texas for the winter break Between semesters
of reading Adichie and Alexie And risking words together to find something Like the point of
this, some search for the reason For the speaker’s love of poems, that pull Of the written word
as artifact, as a kind of tool Against the sometimes overwhelming sadness about all of it—
Including the fact that some of us it seems will never be allowed The time and energy to sit
with a poem, like them In that illusion of shelter, though perhaps They were closer to poetry’s
pursuit, that edge of oblivion Where words begin becoming insufficient—the woman With her
frantic speech beseeching us and the man Extending his bony hand out, as if from the cot
itself, The tremor of it trying to say something that sounded Like a greeting, that sounded like
a plea.

—José Antonio Rodríguez

“Life might be short and brutal, but the point is to survive,” he said. At the end of our visit, he
gave Meiying a bag of plums that he had picked from his own trees. After we left, Meiying
observed that Brother Zhang’s case was not unusual. As people moved where the work was,
the only people left in the villages were the very old, the very young, and the disabled. Shi
Lizhen, the head nurse of the geriatric department at the first hospital Zhang visited, told me
that when she started working, more than thirty years ago, elderly patients typically had six or
seven children, two or three of whom could devote themselves entirely to their parents’ care.
Those days were gone, and the hospital’s resources were so scarce that they couldn’t take
inpatients who didn’t have around-theclock caregivers. Some patients hired health aides, but
many were too embarrassed to ask their children to help with the cost. Shi, who is fifty-seven,
men

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