Adam Fieled (editor, Logan Square/Plymouth Meeting, Pa): "Poem in Two Parts (for Jenny Kanzler)"

I.
What’s in what eyes?
What I see in hers is
mixed greenish silence,
somewhat garish, 
past girlish (not much),
but I can’t touch her
flesh (set to self-destruct),
anymore than she can
understand the book
her cunt is, that no one
reads directly, or speaks
of, there’s no love other
than “could be,” but I
think of her throat cut—
that’s her slice of smut.

II.
Then, there was this—
the creepy sense that it
had all been nothing
to her (everything being
nothing, no one being
anyone, nothing being
anything), & that she
had her own set of
spiders (exquisite or
not) to cast out into
the world to do her
bidding, so that betrayal
was never far from her
blood-rotted, starvation-
besotted, pistol-plotted
mind. And so it was.
That slightly nauseous
green, her paint insignia,
was in her aura, too,
so that blooms of youth
became lands of the dead,
& her domain was as
much visionary deadness
as mine, yet ready to do
real, nauseous, disastrous
evil in the world. I don’t know why.

© Adam Fieled 2010, 2025