Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Wasted, Her Face Melted by Opium
by
Kelley Jean White
--Yang Sieu-yoeh, Gram, recorded 1993, New York
Wasted, her face melted by opium
she bore him four daughters in four years—still
he came to her bed three nights a week with
anger pushing against her jellied flesh;
she willed slow starvation against his will,
refused his eggs, his sour soups, dumplings,
fat, sweets, her rooms smelled of vomit and sweat.
We loved the rich bread smell of the fat slave
in the kitchen— by her our father got
his son, I was not knit in her womb, yet
it was Second Mother I loved, always.
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
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)
