Adam Tavel, featured in the Ocean State Review

I Oedipus on Fridays

I OEDIPUS on Fridays strip my anger off like mummy-wrap
and pitch it at the night, our dusty orchid wallpaper where
shadows are themselves the other half of us, in bed, inside my
head the two of us sending postcards, writing letters on my
wall, don’t forget to take your medicine is how every session ends,
I do, good morning America how are you, don’t you own me,
I’m your empty gun, my life that stank of beer flatlined beside
labor pains up close and personal, here hold a leg the nurses
said, so I did, it’s amazing what you’ll take when someone’s
shrieking in your face, cold facts splat, just like that, a noose of
Yuengling bottle caps clacked across a desk, watch me keep the
images that make your workshop wince, I earned them every
time I gave a classroom busywork so I could run and puke and
teach my sour tongue to sing, all kings dream of hanging things
that never breathe, the tic that counts the doormat leaves, that
chants fourteen fourteen fourteen, I strip it off and wake, another
mask to paint, like St. Peter as Giotto dreamed him, daggered
and unhinged, losing his mind in a midnight garden shrieking,
stand back, O Lord, I’m here to end their eyes.

I Oedipus, Darth Vader, and Jesus Christ

I OEDIPUS, Darth Vader, and Jesus Christ walk into a bar. We
make a clever premise in the ooze. Last week I overheard you
interrupt your creepy student to clarify that Christ was a title
and not a name, hence not a last name, three sentences into his
rant explaining his Jesus Theory. How you stood like a butler
when he shrugged, pouting into his Tom Selleck Reagan-era
mustache. You stay ten minutes after each class humoring him
in the hope that this strained minor kindness will keep you off
his list of people to kill, should some maddened sunbeam wake
him one morning and say, it’s trigger time, O avenging angel
of light. “Where’s Kanye?” Vader sighs, checking his watch.
“This is cluttered enough already,” Jesus says, sipping a V8 he
snuck in under his robe. Today you just smiled and nodded
blankly mid-lecture as this same weirdo told the tale of how he
began shaving in fifth grade. Most nights Vader slurps a fleet of
whiskies through a purple swirly straw before snapping his cape
and strangling random patrons with his mind. Jesus floats them
back, his favorite parlor trick. The bartender lets us get away
with murder. Her name is History. Once or twice a century she
slits her own throat. Your student didn’t hear you as he turned
to pitch his Shasta can of chaw-spit and lurch out. He didn’t
hear you say Christ, it’s Greek, like everything else, and means
anointed one.

I Oedipus admire

I OEDIPUS admire how Caspar David Friedrich dimming at
the end gave himself to autumn branches, that dark greening
he loved best, their drooping sawteeth hazed as if glimpsed by
a child carried through a hollow half-awake. By my end, no
hungers, no strength, I laid startled by flashes, first gazings at
the world that rushed back most real, sudden blossoms on a
sudden shoot. The snap of summer shirts in servants’ hands,
throaty burbles from unstopped decanters, or what of your dead
century, the one you’re always grieving because its madnesses
felt predictable and stalled, a mother’s floral perfume, perhaps,
or the shuffle of a night train, or petting a pony’s steaming nose
while held abstracted above the old coral, father’s stubbly cheek
pressed to yours and you bewildered by the frost that turned the
gate to sapphires. Most real, the animal is us turning. Animal
and real and wordless, beyond the fencerow, distant tangled
limbs, shadow-nests, sprinting breathless now, horse and father
fading, myths of a burned tribe, into that dark real greening,
something animal, you.

Adam Tavel’s sixth collection of poetry is Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2023).