Showing posts with label Christine Orchanian Adler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christine Orchanian Adler. Show all posts

Saturday, August 25, 2012

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.      

Friday, August 24, 2012

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.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

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.