Associate Editor Michael Alessi: I’m drawn to the mysteries of this poem, the world of stories suggested in its imagery of mourning and lost childhood. Like a door that we did not ask to open, Kindred’s work leads us to an unexpected place that feels both foreign and familiar.
Listen to Sally read her poem:
The White Door
When the year of fevers came,
when the child came to the white door that was my collarbone
and sat down and did not ask for it to open,
when the moons rolled from the dark dish
of choked prayer,
when both hounds dreamed—when candles, when teeth—
when I looked down at their pinewood lids and saw, for no
reason I could name, the memory
of July’s first yellow dress, back seat: my father
up at the wheel, and just a map on the seat beside him,
I knew there was an end to the story of sun
and came a river in my skin
cold enough that it could not hold me.
I knew no more than this, my pockets
sagging like kites in the bracken. I knew July
was a country I’d left for good, like girlhood,
like the daughter who walks to the door
in her first yellow dress and knows
the house before her is really a bone
and the bone is never going to open
and let her tired body in.
It is late. Her hands
are alone. The girl sits down.
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Julie Suk Award. She was a 2023 Yetzirah conference fellow, and her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and Kenyon Review Online.
