Kelley White

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 is NO. HOPE STREET (Kelsay Books). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

The Origami Crane

The therapist shows the little girl how to bend

the paper: rectangle, triangle, mountain fold, valley.

They talk about her uncle, who died so soon

after Thanksgiving, so close to Christmas.

He was tired, he went upstairs to lie down.

Then they found him on the bathroom floor unresponsive.

Clots thrown by COVID to his heart, his lungs, his head.

After they took him off life-support they learned he was

diabetic. Black, over 50, a little overweight; he’d never found a doctor

in his new town. So now his little niece folds and folds,

makes a chain of origami cranes for her mother.

So much pain in her family, in her young life.

Her mother tacks them to a bulletin board at work.

Counts them daily. Soon she will choose a pandemic tattoo.

She thinks of her brother. She thinks of her daughter.

Chooses black ink, the outline of a folded crane,

her brother’s name, kissing the inside of her wrist