They’ve been walking all these days over the cage

and scaffold that were her bones, the fat settling

in odd patches like snow against the shadowside

of the mountain. Sometimes their feet pass into

its softness and must search to find a rib or piece

of vertebrae for support. Odd how spacious it is

and the places where the bone breaks through are

beautiful in their singular isolation. Each has taken

a tooth from the circle cave of her mouth and wonders

at its usefulness: this incisor to make a shearing knife,

this molar a mortar for grinding corn. One has found

the small bones of her left ear, incus and stapes and

malleus. He thinks they will make a good lock

for his barn door.

KELLEY WHITE earned degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School. She has been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years.  Her work has appeared in American Writing, The Café Review, Feminist Studies, and most recently, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Larcom Review, The Chiron Review, Minnesota Review and Rattle. Her book of "medical" poems, The Patient Presents, has been published this spring by The People’s Press in Baltimore and her chapbook, "I am going to walk toward the sanctuary," has just been published by Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. She received a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece (Gravity Presses).

ForPoetry