The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Runner-up - Marlene Rosen Fine

Marlene Rosen Fine grew up at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—a borough of New York City. She walked this beach while reciting poems by Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. Marlene has written stories and poems, has been published in anthologies and literary magazines and won a few prizes. She has shared her poems with family and friends and has read in galleries, pubs, coffee houses and bookshops. At twenty-two, while attending graduate school at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Marlene opened, with her husband, Michael J. Fine, The Paper Place bookstore.  They returned to New York City to continue their lives with books and writing and a family. Currently she writes poems and works as acquisitions editor at MJF Books, Fine Creative Media.

The Miner’s Widow

A long time ago in school
I read about the glacial fist
in which seasons twisted,
then stopped.
Anthracite hardened
irregularly, deep,
layer upon layer toward the future.

The flash of my husband’s light
Lit up the floors of his underground life.
He hardly spoke
From shovel to pick.
His skin was white.
His lungs, antique.
Dying by the fire
that made no ash or smoke.

I am the wife
who scrubbed him clean
with a rough brush.
Never enough
so that at night
when the bedsprings kept time
he slipped between my legs
leaving his mark of soot inside.
Each child came blinking out,
pale as a root,
spot of ash on each forehead.
Five children who lived on bread
and minced ham.

"Mrs. Calanski," I say to myself,
"you are eighty-one and need peace."
I remember my husband’s nine-hour day for $1.10.
"When you get a raise, the beer tastes best," he said.
By 1948, he was dead.
Blessed by the priest.
His ashes in a jar.
For $50, burned to ash.
Even the ash from hard coal is worth more.

I live between the Black Lung Benefit
and the Social Security Pension,
wearing time out at my knees and elbows.
The same wind blows
the evening shadows over my garden.
I wear a scarf and heavy, black shoes
as I walk toward my house
past peonies
bursting from the dark bush
and pansies
nodding in their little black masks.