Issue 15

Summer 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.

 

Curse

Everyone said
I was beautiful
when I was a child

I had golden curls
I wanted straight black braids

I had dimples
I tried not to smile

I pouted on the edges
of adult skirts
and door frames

I learned not to want beauty

its cost
its invasion

I put away my face
scraped off my skin

too dangerous
when I was a child

I was beautiful
Everyone said

Curve

I want to curl up
naked and clean
under cool fresh
sheets and be almost
dreaming when you
tuck around me
and kiss my back
from neck to curve
of buttocks and back
again and I just have
to decide whether
to roll over this
time or not.

Heat

dark
held
a red silence full of breathing
a song
nearly touches me
dark
premonition of light
the great sun beginning
open
my eyes

Marriage

A broken balloon.
The donkey places it
in and out of
the empty honey jar.
When I came home
with the children, alone
my mother said
there’s almost nothing
can’t be fixed. I believe her.
I try. I sit all day
fingering the rubbery
fragments, peeling them away
from the inner edges
of my ribs; they fall with
a whisper when I tip over
the bone-empty coop,
my chest.

May

    men change themselves,
all
   hands open to the universe,
beings
   have refuge,
be
   aside from all thinking,
happy
   forever.

May
   the very life of life,
all
   seek wisdom,
beings
   are accepted,
be
   kindled by the flame of life,
free
   to look up and see their beauty.

 

 

© Kelley White

 

 

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