Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, NO. HOPE STREET, was recently published by Kelsay Books.

Poverty is just a letter away from poetry

There are children in these streets
laughing their way past walls falling down
and newspapers sodden against cracked sidewalks.
Cats sun themselves amid piles of chicken bones
and butterflies flit over fecal piles in gutters.
Thin people smile. Dogs wait wagged tailed for hand
outs. The schoolyard has nothing but broken
swings. Poor old city. Our poor home.
And yet we’ll sing it, sing it praises:
poetry is just a letter away from poverty
and you shall find here what you need.

Powerless

Divorce: when we met you said you’d never even consider it
recalling your mother’s suffering, your sisters’ you own,
which at the time I found just a tiny bit frightening, such
permanence, but when you came down to it, and there was
another, younger, woman you said now I see my father was right
and I’m just going to get out and do it when I’m younger than he was
and have a chance at another woman. Oh what if: I had gathered
the children and taken them away to the love of my parents
my village my trees, turned my back on you, boy who forgot love
who never learned it, but no, I clung and fought until I say 
your father ready to write the check, $100,000 to take them, 
our children and never ask for any more or show my face again;
my parents and I considered it, it was a sum of money we almost 
could not imagine, then friends said my children needed you 
in their lives and I knew your father could write larger checks
to lawyers and gave up and became the one powerless inside.