Adam Tavel

The Day after the Massacre

Their sprinting footsteps thudded down the hall
accompanied by teenage blasphemy
so loud it shook the glass in classroom doors
shut tight to keep our sleepy lectures safe.
 
I stumbled past my teetered office stacks
of composition essays that argued
all opposition claims were trussed with lies
to stand there, phone in hand, for reckoning.
 
Instead, I saw Miranda and Jose,
their thin and perfect bodies smashed against
the free speech board, a frenzied swirl of tongues
as if they sought to grind themselves into
 
one spit-slick animal in skinny jeans.
Sweaty, shaking, I faced the corridor.
Dust motes orbited shafts of autumn light
that streamed through squares of window glare
 
where the custodian glanced up to grin
and wave, nonchalantly polishing the sill.
For one more day, no skulking gunman lurched
to spray and consummate our wide-eyed fall.

---

The Blacksmith’s Daughter

            for Richard Furrer

Beyond her dragon dream she feels the hand,
her father’s, palsied, tussle her to wade
into her turn. She wears no furs to work
both bellows on her knees, her spindly arms
pumping shushes into the oven’s rage.
A year ago she choked on every face
that floated from smoke and masked the stars
until her brother shoved her back to sleep.
Now she breathes his face, flame-born, unspoiled,
as it was before the drooping pikes drug
it across the moor. Ulfberht. The crucible’s
snug clay womb. She blows his spirit back
against the glowing dragon-jaws. Her hands
begin to wake a blade to cleave through seas.




--
Adam Tavel is the author of Plash & Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015), winner of the Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry, and The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, 2016). His recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in Poetry Daily, Oxford Poetry, Crazyhorse, and Tar River Poetry, among others. He is a professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College and the reviews editor for Plume. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/