Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)

I Was Third Sister,
Jie-jie Was Just Six

Kelley Jean White

--Yang Sieu-yoeh, Gram, recorded 1993, New York

I was third sister, Jie-jie was just six
but she had to give Mother medicine
each day. Jie-jie was gentle, calm, yielding,
I was busy angry fire, shielding
Mei-mei’s eyes from the filthy torn bedding,
the night-soil buckets, basins of vomit.
Jie-jie stood quiet before our adder-
mouthed mother. She massaged her, stroked her arms,
shoulders; her back, once beautiful, become
wasted, her face melted by opium

Kelley Jean White

USA

Kelley White is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School and worked as a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for more than twenty-five years. She has recently returned to her small New Hampshire village and begun work at a rural health center in the North Country. Her poems have been widely published over the past decade, in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association and in several chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently TOXIC ENVIRONMENT from Boston Poet Press. She is the recipient of a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant in poetry.

Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)