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Click title to download microchap
Cover deisgn by JanK
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new years day
forgetting time
snow always falling
January 3rd
icicles hang inside
the bedroom
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winter storm watch
checking cancellations
for the morning
cranky morning
I stop listening
to your dreams
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rain’s a little warmer
today we leave
our winter seclusion
july darkness
just a few
last fireflies
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unquiet
your open-mouthed snoring
this sadness between us
dolphins leaping
I can almost see them
you and I grown old
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your last roses
light in the garden
changes
sunrise:
moonflowers slowly
closing
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‘you learn from your mistakes’
‘you will learn a lot today’
cracked fortune cookie
such beauty
in disordered
order
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Kelley Jean White © 2024
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Click title to download microchap
Cover: Shaker Village from
Homespunstitchworks.co.uk
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Avenue of Maples
The real sugar orchard backs the pasture
behind the dairy but here are two rows,
grandmother trees, fiercely guarding
the way to the meetinghouse,
spaced widely enough apart to allow two
wagons to pass, each bearing a dozen or more
worshippers. Each tree is a memory,
of a child who came to the village,
and now look at them: matriarchs
smiling with the sweetest sugar dripping
from each wound made by sapsucker or man.
When they are leafless in winter
one can see dark etched faces of bark,
withered but strong twig fingers;
and oh the beauty when they dress to dance
in spring’s palest greens, and oh their fiery
dance in fall.
Fire House
We live here in a village of wood.
Already we have seen our barns
destroyed. Some in our boulevard
of trees have been lightning struck.
A few outbuildings were lost
to clumsiness. A candle, a lamp,
a mislit stove. Water we have, in plenty.
And so we have made hoses and reels
and horses at the ready to carry it,
the saving baptism of our seven ponds,
a balm to any burnings. So our people
may rest assured. We are prepared.
Fire. Water. Prayer.
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Firetruck
All a-shine brass and rubbed black
rubber and that red that only has
one use—alarm. But now no men,
a handful of women, and all the fires have
burned out. Yet what if our silence
were to flame up? Oh, the townspeople
would come, perhaps to save our story—
but see how they failed to save
the great barn? Oh, fifty years, forty,
twenty-five, all will be fallen, even
stone.
The Great Dwelling
At last I welcomed this narrow bed. Light
slicing across a golden floor. I’d been
running from him six years. Left my mother,
father, children. Yes I left my children.
That was my greatest sin. Left them to his
anger, his confusion, his forgetting.
And I hoped it would become forgetting.
That in his drink he’d not see their faces.
I carried my small bundle up the sweep
of stairs and was welcomed by a candle
and Sister Edith, who would become peace
to my aloneness. I’d hand her my mangled
heart. My whispers of hope. She would give me
time. One answer. To let me be. Be me.
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Sisters’ Shop
This is our world, morning light
as we sit to our tasks, our knitting,
darning, mending and the manufacture
of Fancy Goods. These are now
popple cloth, woven of fine strips
fitted to molds. Hard on the hands.
Some are then embellished with
rosettes and other trimmings, too
‘World’ for our use. We miss the palm
leaves long used for our bonnets
and these useful (if fanciful) items.
War has taken them from us, so we turn
to this material close at hand, our fast
growing poplars, first to emerge
after a forest has been cleared, or
burned.
Carriage Barn
--Canterbury Shaker Village, NH
Now it’s air-conditioned. Lite lunches
and refreshments. They’ve done
a nice job converting stalls to booths
where families can feel quite private
unwrapping sandwiches, spooning soup.
Quality sodas and juices. Nice little packs
of smoked cheeses and sausage. Jellies.
Gourmet Chips. Still there’s a slam
occasionally of a real screen door and
occasionally a real fly makes it inside—
and let me take your hand and I’ll guide
you upstairs where a dozen wagons,
coaches, even a pair of sleighs, sleep
in the dust dizzy light.
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Kelley Jean White © 2023
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Click title to download microchap
Cover: Getty Images, Sololos
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Constellation
This boy who hangs around my daughter
this boy my daughter watches for at the window
needs a ride home.
He has forgotten his jacket.
He stands in a tee shirt, thin
white arms, white neck
beneath the December New Hampshire night
turned east, white face
to dark shoulders of mountains and wood,
“See those stars? I see them every night.
No matter where I am, wherever,
I see them. . .”
“That’s Orion’s Belt.” I point, quick,
“and those three are his sword,
and that littler dipper there is the Pleiades.”
My daughter is silent beside him,
her dark hair brushes
his raised arm.
I make a fuss
folding his bicycle into
the back of the van.
“I think of them as my stars;”
his voice grown smaller.
We leave for Philadelphia tomorrow.
Whyever did I think
the conversation
included me?
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‘Constellation’ previously appeared
in Limestone Circle and in
LATE (People’s Press)
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He’ll be 18 in August
Sheet lightning. Tornado warnings
on TV: ‘If you’re in a trailer get
to a well-built home.’ And he’s standing
in the doorway. Rain sheeting
off a new shaved scalp. Dark
glasses at midnight like when he’s run
here from his father’s fist. And daughter,
I can’t give him your number. I can’t
tell him where you are. And he still calls
me mom. But I can’t hold him. Can’t press
my palm against that bleeding
new tattoo, USMC, on his right bicep.
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‘He’ll be 18 in August’ appeared
online in Houseboat and in Against
Medical Advice
(Pudding House Publications)
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Twenty
He says each day’s a constant struggle for
survival. Always hostiles, I.E.Ds.--
scout a building on patrol, take it, move
in, fortify it, then it’s time to move
on. The first week on the ground explosives
blew up the building they were securing:
a dump truck, driven by insurgents, rigged.
He watched the scene over and over on
U-Tube from his hospital bed. Patched up
it was a matter of days before he
was back on patrol. A car bomb knocked one
of his fellow marines unconscious. He
began treating the wound, a grenade fell,
“I’m awake, but I haven’t awoken.”
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‘Twenty’ appeared (as ‘Twenty-one) in
Connecticut River Review
He’s twenty one now
Just old enough to drink beer legally,
and he’s been a marine almost four years,
wounded three times in Fallujah, shrapnel
from an explosive-rigged truck; house cave-in;
the worst from a grenade in his back and
shoulders. He’s learned to tighten the muscle
of his young face, won’t remember his fears,
they’re sharp, buried subcutaneously.
If he gets home this summer my daughter
will run her hands over those corded scars
cover him as his body covered his
brain-injured friend’s, a shield of tender flesh.
He doesn’t ask for much. He wants a beer,
a pizza, a TV. America.
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‘He’s twenty one now’ appeared in
Contemporary American Voices
Kelley Jean White ©2022
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Click title to download PDF microchap
Cover: Herbal display over art by
Lauri Burke
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Item for auction: Mortar and pestle,
for grinding herbs, both pieces
of turned birch retaining
a patinated surface. Acquired
at the Shaker Community
in Canterbury, N.H. H. 7” dia. 6”
(mortar), circa 1830. $420
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Angelica for cold and cough
Bee Balm for antisepsis
Dear Chamomile to help your sleep
Dill settles your digestion
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Echinacea will stop your sneeze
Fennel Seed will sweeten breath
Garlic is good for soothing throats
Horehound helps cure bronchitis
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Impatiens keep skin free of rash
Joe-pye Weed soothes your kidneys
Kudzu’s an aphrodisiac
Lady’s Mantle eases menses
Marigolds soothe insect bites
Nutmeg is good for back pain
Put Oregano on cuts and scrapes
Use Peppermint Oil for migraine
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Quinine cures malaria
Red Clover grants longevity
Sage will help your memory
Tansy’s abortifacient
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Unicorn Root aids childbirth
Violet leaves are cathartic
Witch Hazel helps with eczema
Ox-eye Daisies count beloveds
Yarrow will stop (or start) a nosebleed
Zingiber officinale treats arthritis pain
(You know it more as ginger, its tea
Also helpful for queasy stomachs.)
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Kelley Jean White © 2021
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Click title to download PDF microchap
Cover: Art background by Lauri Burke
with Crane Collage by JanK
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New Year’s crowns crooked
fighting sleep, we strain to hear
the first rooster crow
folded inside
a paper crane
secret haiku
on a tissue box:
herein lies hope for your nose
found haiku
left the city
left the town, even the village
glad now of a dirt road
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on the train
even the sad songs
sweet
Memorial Day—
each year the lilacs
grow sweeter
sight's gone, hearing's
going--still the taste
of chocolate
you criticize me
then ask forgiveness—a kiss with
a stone in my mouth
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swallowing bitterness
grasping at self
she sips black coffee
crushing snowfall
my mother’s cancer
metastatic
snow still falling
my neighbor speaks of her mother’s
last days
spun cocoon
who waits
inside?
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Kelley Jean White © 2020
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Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA Her most recent collection, NO. HOPE STREET is published by Kelsay Books. She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.