Issue 9
December 2001
Kelley White
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.
two winter roses
blood red against wrought iron
and the new bright snow
tucked against your chest--
winds caress my skin, sunlight
on open meadow
symmetry moving
arms, leg, back; womb-warm water
backstroke counting peace
summer afternoon
lichen prickle, insect buzz
stinging white dry heat
standing flat feet
back to back, baby sister’s
a full hair taller