Issue 13

Winter 2003

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.





Sabbatical

Shall I become academic
at fifty? Research child
abuse? Proclaim myself
expert at life and give
meaning at last to this
apprentice victimhood?

So bitter the hours

over empty evenings
mirrored walls reflecting
empty eyes and hands
tender words unspoken
intimacies rebroken
meager love ended
entropy begins

Thief

I must return the scissors
I took from Miss Kenney’s
room in 1959: I had not meant
to steal. I was working hard
at my cutting and forgot
to return them when the row
collector came by. I had to
bring them home. I had to.

To my former husband

I would like to feel compassion
but I don’t exactly see you suffering.
This makes it kind of difficult for me
to feel sorry for you.

Two Christmases Ago

It was two Christmases ago
Do you remember?
I was fourteen (an easily broken mind, just bursting
                         out of the tough unbreakable,
safe
                   plastic shell of childhood)
There’s a lot of innocence lost
Between fourteen and sixteen
I don’t know what you gain

That was the Christmas before
Your sister’s wedding
My mother told me (I’d read about things like that — the
                               other girls, but there was a mystical magic
about
                  the wrongness of it)
And your mother thought
Her shame was the family’s
Shared sin that cut them apart

That Christmas we called your mother
To see the tree
She cried (I hid in my room, but heard the voices,
sobs,
                my mother said, “she’s still your
daughter,” more
                  sobs; they both cried)
And yes, there was a diamond
I saw it on her finger
I’ve never liked diamonds

I showed you my Christmas
What did you get?
A sweater (it was buried in the mountains of frilly
                  things and toys, insignificant in all
that
              multitude)
When your brother wasn’t looking

You put your hand on my knee
I moved to another chair

Later the Christmas party moved
To your house
We watched t.v. (lying on your parent’s bed, “the
                           Nutcracker Suite” with your brother and
                           the cigar box between us)
But later on, he fell asleep
And you put your arm around me
I sat up then and moved to another chair

That Christmas was almost over
It was like any other
Child Christmas (midnight mass we’d been together, or
                          waiting for Santa and falling asleep together
                          on the couch)
But then you said, “kiss me”
And I shrank back, but you pulled me
And I kicked and hit

It was two Christmases ago
Do you remember?

 

© Kelley White

 

Index