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KelleyWhiteMD@Yahoo.com http://www.geocities.com/kelleywhitemd/

Belly

I lay my face against the baby's belly.
I close my eyes. She laughs.
The warm brown skin calms my forehead.
All stiffness melts. I smell fresh
laundry and distant flowers.
Tendrils twist my hair, sighing
breath flows across my eyes. Everyone has
gone home. I am a fallen tree trunk,
bound by vines and the sweet, dark earth.


Belly was published in Amercian Writing #19, March 2000 and in THE PATIENT PRESENTS, published by The People's Press, Baltimore

Chastity

Hearing aids forgotten, Chastity reads my lips, answers, second grade.

The grandmother asks if my children have much homework on weekends.
"She is just so busy, what with dance, choir practice, speech therapy, Sunday School. . .
They gave her eight Bible verses to memorize twice a week--
She done so well they doubled it to sixteen,
And then it's Sunday evening and she's trying to do so much."
Chastity smiles. Deaf.

Once she was a baby we said had no chance for a normal outcome,
APGAR*s zero and zero and two after intracardiac epinephrine and cardiac massage.
She was able to suck, despite constant seizures. She gained weight, grew.
She boarded in the nursery three months until the father
sweet-talked social services into letting him take her home.

Her father was the man who broke her mother's jaw.
He held the iron pipe above her head
when his gang raped her, five months pregnant.
She had no prenatal care.

The mother is on the street now, straggled, hectic, angry;
On prenatal morning she stole my sandwich from the lunch room.
I thought she was sixty, waiting for the geriatric doctor.
She was sixteen. She took crack to induce labor.
She left the hospital immediately after giving birth.

The teen-aged boys in the house saved the baby.
They brought her for her check ups, dressed her, fed her, changed her.
They taught her to smile and coo and laugh and walk.
Now there is a grandmother.

I do not know what happened to that man, her son--I do not care--
that too smooth man, that "father" dripping gold from neck and hands,
gripping the fine leather case that held his cellular phone.

This sweet-faced church woman is his mother.
Chastity prays.

* APGARs-a scoring system from 1 to 10 used to rate the viability of newborns

Dawn

I'm going down to sign up for Community next Tuesday
when he goes back to school,
10th grade at central. . .
Remember, I was fourteen then, breastfeeding. . .

I'm going to do it this time,
just got out of an abusive relationship that was going
nowhere after seven years, physically, emotionally, financially.

I said, "'You're not my son's father."
Everywhere we lived it was my place.
My phone bill. My car. Never his.

He's a union carpenter. I stayed with him til he got to that.
Now it's my time. I'm responsible.

© All Copyright, March 20, 2002, Kelley Jean White MD.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.