• Facebook
• Instagram

Adam Tavel

__________

Nightie

edamame green and lace the last
August breeze blew through it
like a windsock the idle rich soar
above their beachfront cottage to say
look even the air we own that too

at twelve I was old enough to want it
against my cheek but didn’t nor did I
want to see it on my friend’s
sister’s college body that most
humdrum of boyhood fantasies

no what I wanted was an improbable
lingered flapping on the clothesline
past supper past our bruising vacant
lot touchdowns at sundown to glance
from my window hued by star-frost

and find it there still knuckled
by wooden pins long after the men
of Spring Branch Drive in weariness
drove home greasy hungry ready
to yell away another muggy dusk

I wanted the dishwasher bones
of his mother’s hands to drape it
on the porch so I could tiptoe nervously
in dew to clip it high and rightful for
our crooked hours left to stun the moon

__________

Skull Winter

The hill we called a mountain froze
a sheer sheet the blizzard’s second day
when wind blew powdery beards
on maple trunks. Panting to the top
in pity boots that almost fit I smirked

each time I caught a glimpse beyond
of our school convent, desolate
as a dead calf’s barn stall,
where those bitter sisters were left
to scold themselves. My older cousins

squealed, zipping down in puffs of ice
so far below at times I couldn’t tell
who among us steered so brazenly
toward the apple tree, just to jerk
before the crash, then roll, crunching

to a stop. Heaving, they each laid
puffy as a sleeping bag, the remnant
storm whipping red cheeks redder.
The rusty sled that fell to me
would hardly turn. Baling twine

mottled as oatmeal soaked up slush,
slackening around planks as hours
wore on, until at last I aimed
my crossbow peak at branches
and lurched. I wish when I awoke

I was glad to see the faces
of kin encircling me, teary
and relieved, a sky featureless
as slate and the boyish glory
of a sled in splinters. But I shut

my eyes again to the commands
to count their show of hands, aching
with a strange new grief I was
called back from the silence there
inside the bark, ringed and endless.

__________

Adam Tavel’s third poetry collection, Catafalque, won the Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2018). You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/

__________

<< Back Next >>

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.