Adam Tavel
Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award and is the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, forthcoming) and the chapbook Red Flag Up (Kattywompus). His recent poems appear or will soon appear in The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, Cream City Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Our Lady of Crabapple Hill
for my grandmother
the hoe samuraied above your head
splits the vermillion dusk that gleams
its one dull tooth: you growl
for me to pace the parched ravine below
where craning I will the witless
garter snake into a viper, incalculable,
rearing its teardrop hood against the sky
& swaying like a wino: I shudder
each time the blade peals down
to chip its skin apart, the slick guts
pulled taffy in grass & the idle
flopping of a tail that takes its death
in twitches: brow sweat runnels
to cloud the threat of things that threaten
not but for their gore: how the handle bears
its droop like a giant shoelace
to the woods & flings: I miss the smears
of blood beside my leather mitt that marks
home base until I stoop to pick it up
at supper's bell when I lick
tart explosions from my palms
blistered from batting apples & pant
the rolling acre back unto
silver: the shadow-screen: your hair