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.