Issue 12

Fall 2002

Kelley White

http://www.geocities.com/kelleywhitemd/

was born and raised in New Hampshire, have degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School, and have been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years. I write to survive. I started sending work a year and a half ago with very modest goals (I hoped to have a half dozen poems published by my fiftieth birthday in 2004) but have had somewhat surprising success, with well over 250 poems accepted or published by more than one hundred journals including American Writing, The Café Review, Feminist Studies, and most recently, Whiskey Island Magazine and Rattle. A book of my "medical" poems, The Patient Presents, has been published this month by The People’s Press in Baltimore and a chapbook of very different material, "I am going to walk toward the sanctuary," will be published this summer by Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. I received a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece (from Gravity Presses) in 2000, my first year of submission. My children and I are shocked by this success.

 

 

First Contact

I never learned to balance you
in the dance.
You tried so hard
to demonstrate.
My body, mind, rushing,
failed
to understand.

I made you miss the next dance:
standing on the side
teaching me you missed
your next partner.
I forced you
to sit out

I fled across the room.
I got the bottle
I had hidden
beneath a chair,
took a deep drink,
then thought
across the faces
of you alone;

I came to sit,
legs swinging
beside you
on the stacked up chairs.

Then you knew
I was real.

Guanyin

You fed me
and I spoke
with difficulty
of the darkness.
You did not go.
You held me.

Now I will do
this work
of hearing
one moment more.

Is this the reason
for my hunger?

I grow fat,
accepting,
accepted.

What essence
shall I pour?

Memorial

Let
     there be a wall
for the children murdered
for children broken
     who died in fear
for small bodies
     dying speechless

a wall of hands reaching
     toward our faces
toward our hard dry eyes

Odds are I’ll need a cardiologist

my mother loves hers
and who wouldn’t love my mother?

it is nice being told
you lived a good life and ought to stay around
to do somemore good work

but
can you imagine the ruckus
bumping up against the pillow

if we both of us
wore our hearts

on our sleeve?

 

© Kelley White

 

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