Adam Tavel 

Letter to Schnell Written on Glovebox Napkins

Goatee and Mascara Smear were names
I gave the exes brawling in the haze
of our daycare's lot this morning. Younger

than my muffler, Mascara slammed
a car seat looking like it lost
a bet with box cutters in the bed

of Goatee's rusted Silverado. Its bumper
read “Like a Rock” beside a peeling
sticker of Calvin's halo bowed

before a cross that didn't reach
much higher than his scalp.
I thought of Hammurabi yawning

on his famous stele where the sense
of scale shows the king hardly smaller
than Shamash, god enthroned,

god who helped Gilgamesh destroy
that lion-faced prick Humbaba who,
legend had it, could roar a flood.

The Police thumped their imitation
reggae through my one good speaker
which I cranked to a muddy thrum

not wanting James to hear the flood
of expletives. Belted in we belted
“Roxanne” so loud the couple's

finger-jabs looked Chaplinesque
across the steaming blacktop. Bitch
until I die Goatee screamed

as I creaked my door open,
Mascara's jalopy sputtering past
the curb with its wrong blinker

contradicting her merge. Antsy
from our long commute, James sang
an abridged version of the alphabet

toddling to rainbow double doors
though over my shoulder
slung with a diaper bag I saw

Goatee grab a socket wrench
from the naked wreckage of his truck
and whip it at fumes and the ghost

of a lemon long gone. I wish I could
report the tinny metal clang it made
when it smacked against asphalt

but mochachino traffic
roared its frantic whooshing
so I couldn't hear when it landed

if at all. Maybe end over end
it boomeranged around the earth
while the hand that pitched it punched

a steering wheel into a mouth
that's staccato horn toots sounded
like the name America.




Adam Tavel's first poetry collection, The Fawn Abyss, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2014.  He received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his latest poems appear or will soon appear in West Branch, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, and The Minnesota Review, among others.  Tavel is the poetry editor for Conte and an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.




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