M&M’s

by

Kelley J. White

Morbidity & Mortality conference at the morgue:
I roll the body out of the stainless steel freezer,
wheel the slick quiet rack across the black & white tile
floor, damp, cool, hosed down after all that bleeding.

The towel molded to the shape of a face, I know
the bruises underneath, the black lined eyes
the crusted blood we left on the lips, the chipped front
teeth. I am the presenter. You’re in the theatre audience:

black-bearded. Blue eyed. Blue. All the white coated men
hold their knives up to salute us. They will open the abdomen.
Weigh the liver, spleen, womb. I am in charge of the scale.
Heavy shears clip bone, split the chest. The heavy heart

fills my hands. I pass it into the darkness to you. The cloth
slips, a bit of pursed lip breathing from the corpse. My face.
A little breeze from the freed soul. I take it in my lungs.

 

 

 

Kelley writes: “A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Medical School, I long to return to my childhood home in Gilford Village, NH, but am unable to leave my inner-city pediatric practice in Philadelphia. Poetry keeps me sane. My work has been widely published over the past five years, including several chapbooks, most recently Rule of Thumb, which received the Cynic Prize from Cynic Press, and full length collections, most recently Living in the Heart from Word Press. My poems have appeared in numerous journals including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association. I have just learned that I am the recipient of a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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