Serena J. Fox

Life Flight

Bio: Serena J. Fox (Night Shift Poems, 2009: Night Landing (chaplet), 2018) is an internal medicine physician and poet. She began her career in the Bellevue Hospital emergency room during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in New York City. She practiced critical care medicine in a major trauma center in Washington DC, then returned to New York City to work nights in the ICU through Covid. Part of her responsibilities while in DC included med-control for the medevac helicopters serving the area in and around the Beltway. She has also served as a consultant in bedside medical ethics and a human rights advocate with the Asylum Network of Physicians for Human Rights. 

Dr. Fox believes deeply that poetry and the Humanities have essential roles in the teaching of medicine, ethics, human rights, and caregiving. She serves on the Board of the Bellevue Literary Review volunteer faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine Mount Sinai Academy of Medicine and the Humanities. She has facilitated poetry workshops for the NYU School of Medicine Master Scholar’s Program and for the Examined Life Conference sponsored by the University of Iowa Carver School of Medicine. Dr. Fox is the poetry editor for the Examined Life Journal published by the latter The Examined Life Journal – University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Western Humanities Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and the Examined Life Journal. She is grateful to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the MacDowell Colony for the residencies that allowed her protected time to work on poems. children.

Night Shift Poems: https://www.turningpointbooks.com/serena-fox.html
Night Landing: https://www.belladonnaseries.org/chaplets/p/235-serena-j-fox-night-landing
Bellevue Literary Review: https://blreview.org

Icahn School of Medicine Mount Sinai Academy of Medicine and the Humanties: https://icahn.mssm.edu/education/medical/clinical/humanities

Statement:  Poems, for me, usually start with a seed. Something stops me in my tracks. It could be a usually inconsequentialdetail, a heroic moment or a sensory experience. The seed sits and sooner or later begins a journey to a finishedpoem. The journey and its destination are often unforeseen. When approaching the video Life Flight, I had to findmy way into a given work very differently. The point of view and the music were fixed. The only thing I knew wasthat a “life-flight” helicopter entered at some point. I decided to watch the full-length video without music first. It wasexcruciating. I had to remind myself that I believed in meditation and remaining present. The intrusion of the man-made machine, life flight or not, was both a relief and jarring. I then found myself ruminating about the sky andcloud formations rather than watching the video itself. Next, I watched the video with the music commissioned forit. I found that the music grounded the sky and clouds, brought them back to human scale, gave them a timeframe. This surprised me. I remembered that perception relied on the brain completing the picture, the narrative. I reexplored the neurobiology of vision and came across the Principle of Closure. This is a visual perception law(Gestalt principle) that describes how humans have a natural inclination to perceive incomplete or fragmentedvisual elements as a complete object. The brain typically fills in the gaps in an image where there are missing partsto perceive a unified and coherent form. The man-made helicopter became a symbol of the frailty and tenacity ofhuman hope, second chances in the face of eternity.