Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)

1928, Foundling Home, Shanghai

Kelley Jean White

Praise for the dead man who once spared their lives,
they bow at the Well of Leaving Heaven,
twenty little girls with crusted noses
in the raw air. How can a five year old
child be in a better place without her
mother? Ghost child, with no father but lies,
and locked is the house of working children—
this one has a pretty face, but she's thin,
and smart—she stares and whispers with dead men.
This talent they'll sell, make a fortune on.

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)