Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
1935, French Concession, Shanghai
by
Kelley Jean White
When they bind her at night in the ghost world
her mother sends white feathers, stones, crystals
of ice and water chestnuts, poppies, black
balls of opium. She would suck back
all her words, the voices of temple bells
to keep the silence of her mother's hands
against her brow. She wakes cold. Blood has stained
her thighs. She knows this change. The ghosts will leave
her now. She must find another skill. Mind.
Beauty. Which does the Governor's daughter see?
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)
