Adam Tavel
Blue Horror
a crush of nurses elbow
their version of the story
down the intensive care
corridor to claw his tongue
back up a narrow well so
I burrow in scratches his
DTs cratered in my palms
to brace against the blue
flashes even in the family
room where one ending is
a breath deep as a gunshot
fired straight inside a field’s
dark chest and the other
is some strange hand lightly
grasping my shoulder to pull
me from the meadowhawks
behind my eyelids whirring
unstartled where I dry fire
my revolver at the harvest
Adam Tavel’s third poetry collection, Catafalque, recently won the 2017 Richard Wilbur Award and is forthcoming with the University of Evansville Press. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and Plash &Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015), winner of the Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry. His recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in Poetry Daily, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Atlanta Review, Oxford Poetry, and Arts & Letters, among others. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/.
Return to September 2017 Edition
a crush of nurses elbow
their version of the story
down the intensive care
corridor to claw his tongue
back up a narrow well so
I burrow in scratches his
DTs cratered in my palms
to brace against the blue
flashes even in the family
room where one ending is
a breath deep as a gunshot
fired straight inside a field’s
dark chest and the other
is some strange hand lightly
grasping my shoulder to pull
me from the meadowhawks
behind my eyelids whirring
unstartled where I dry fire
my revolver at the harvest
Adam Tavel’s third poetry collection, Catafalque, recently won the 2017 Richard Wilbur Award and is forthcoming with the University of Evansville Press. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and Plash &Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015), winner of the Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry. His recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in Poetry Daily, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Atlanta Review, Oxford Poetry, and Arts & Letters, among others. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/.
Return to September 2017 Edition