Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pa, USA): from Something Solid: The Nineties: Season in Hell: White Candle

Once, if we remembered rightly, our life was
a feast at which all hearts opened & all wines
flowed. Now, we found ourselves reduced, as
the unmade bed in room 510 became a symbol
of disorder in our brains, separately & together.
This was our last stand, to & for each other— to
prove, beyond reasonable doubt, what forever
could mean to a boy & girl, partitioned first from
each other like Romeo & Juliet themselves, now
free from our clans to not accept our respective
conditions. Sleeplessly, we fucked living hell
out of each other, with desperate, animal
intensity, man & wife welded together in white
candle wax, singed into perpetual melt, resolved

into loose fluid. The web around you, Jennifer—
schemes, starvation—if they never knew the woman you
became there & then, in a hotel bed in State College,
amid summer throngs— you & I knowing would have
to be good enough (me taking twenty-five years to see
it), our bodies burning in Elysian fields. O witches, O
misery, O hatred, we entrusted nothing to you at all,
even as guns were lined up for our excoriation. Walled
in on all sides, you left it to me to demonstrate your
wifeliness to the world. I am not merely pleased to
do so— the white candle of our non-immolation
stands in a state of perfect & perfectly lit equilibrium
in the corn-fields behind what used to be your
trailer, the perfect image of our marriage, war—

© Adam Fieled 2022