Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)

1932, Spirit Medium, Hanzhong Road

Kelley Jean White

This talent they'll sell, make a fortune on,
old man jade and opium stink: she is
the butterfly in the mimosa tree,
the tiger tear, phoenix egg; her safety
in her bone-rattling trances, messages
from the yellow springs, the ones gone beyond
always say give, more money to the girl's
keepers, the men who hold her silken leash--
there are no words for the size of this grief,
when they bind her at night in the ghost world.

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)