ON A BIOGRAPHICAL PAMPHLET OF LUTHER LADD, FIRST MARTYR OF THE CIVIL WAR, WHO DIED DURING THE 1861 BALTIMORE RIOT

The vast cortege that followed his remains

graveside was full of patriots. So claims

the nameless hand that has us too believe

that Ladd, seventeen, a sapling, so grieved

the splintered Union that he kept his post

& stars aloft as riot bricks from roasted

ghetto tenements rained down to bash

the Massachusetts brave. They all were brats

& greybeards, damn it all, who slumped & waned

& weaved some twenty blocks from train to train.

The artist’s doughy hatching sketch—a likeness

taken from life—is so coarse the boy’s lidless

eyes bulge amphibian. His sisters bound

the flag that drank his blood to waltzing gowns.

Adam Tavel recently won the inaugural Permafrost Book Prize for his collection Plash & Levitation, which will be published by the University of Alaska Press in spring 2015. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and the chapbook Red Flag Up (Kattywompus). Tavel won the 2010 Robert Frost Award and his recent poems appear in Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Salamander, among others.