Christine Orchanian Adler: Breaths of Spring

breaths of spring        

from an attic trunk     

old love letters     

This haiku has previously appeared in Penumbra and appears here courtesy of the author.      

Christine Orchanian Adler: Middle Space

Early Sunday I hug my son off

to school; his cool-skinned arm

wrapped around my back, a warm,

whiskered kiss against my cheek.

After he’s left I get the call:

his cousin, a passenger,

car crash last night. At high

speed, tether-free, they rolled,

were thrown. “No survivors,”

my brother breaks down.

Devastation splits me open

like a rock in summer sun.

I imagine his son, the same

young age as mine; man-boy

with parenthetical freckles around

an ever-ready grin.

Evidence of another statistic,

the roadside stone, heavy

and unyielding as grief

is already laden with flowers.

In coming months I will drive

by the site. My heart

will clench as sunlight strikes

the stone without warning, glints

like a flare: there

then gone.

My son drives toward

his dorm, alive, still

in the world

of before, his future

stretched ahead like the bright

clear sky, awash with light. Dry-eyed

before absorbing the weight of my brush

with a mother’s greatest loss

I reach slowly for the phone

to bring him home.

This poem has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Issue #15, and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Introducing Christine Orchanian Adler

Christine Orchanian Adler is a writer and editor whose poetry has appeared in Coal: A Poetry Anthology, Penumbra, Tipton Poetry Journal, and online at Bird and Moon, Damselfly Press, The Furnace Review, LiteraryMama and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Inkwell Journal. She holds a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. Her articles, essays and book reviews have appeared in various publications throughout the Northeastern United States and Canada. She blogs at www.feedalltheanimals.blogspot.com, and lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

Christine Orchanian Adler: Mine

The year my dad’s back

gave out, Doc Hadden read the tests

and sighed, “black lung” while mother

stood apron clad with hanky-pressed mouth,

dry eyed. Some months later came

her call, a blinking light left, found

upon my tired return from

a medical research cram.

I pulled the indexed notes, stacked

so neatly in my bag and sat,

listened to her words and flipped

through detail-crowded cards,

each a meticulous list

of disease and lethal symptoms.

I’d read their names, drop my eyes

test myself: Scrofula: tubercular

infection; impacts throat lymph glands.

At twenty, he’d followed his father

into the seams, ceilings dripping water. He’d lie

in mud, supine, nineteen working inches

lit only by his miner’s lamp.

Yaws: chronic, relapsing infectious

illness; spirochete caused; cannot penetrate

skin. Influenza: virus; changes by mutation.

The day he told me the story of Macbeth,

the mine that blew a dark March day

and took his father’s life, I knew the chain

would break. Pneumoconiosis: also known

as black lung disease; two forms—

simple and progressive massive fibrosis.

Miners who’d once gone below

in dark of early morning trudged

over those same entries bearing

stretchers, mangled corpses of family men.

He’d rushed the vast black cavity of Macbeth

Mine that day, stood among the town waiting.

They’d remain long, dark days, edge

the mine’s mouth while rain poured down,

a town of immobile kin. The mournful

cable whine brought them to the surface

body after body

but the screams of widows rising

at each man’s recognition haunt

my father still. “It’s all we knew.”

He shrugged his burly shoulders, pointed

his eyes downward when I made

medical school my goal

instead of coal. “It’s over,”

her voice fell flatly in the room.

Cards fluttered to the floor

while I sat, eyes down understanding

that the only life I’d saved

by breaking the chain was mine.

This poem has appeared in Coal: A Poetry Anthology, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.