Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Something Solid, Aughts Philly, "4325 Baltimore Avenue"

Jason cooking flounder on a filthy range, picked
up at 40th & Walnut where Penn students mingled
with artists, Chomsky-ites, bums, mothers, where
French bread for two bucks we’d carry around for
walks home down rustic mansion’d streets, fish-waft
filling lovably threadbare kitchen laden with mustard
& crumbs. Mary’s Acme-purchased pesto pasta, Olive-oil
Goddess, she’d make a pot on pot in a pot & we’d
have a bowl from the pot watching hot French-flicks
in the lived-in living room. Paintings, Mary’s evocations
Dionysus & Apollo, Jason post-Dali post-structuralist
Dada & Derrida derived violences, submitted to smitten
PAFA judges, originals all flecked with little chips from
the falling ceiling leaned. Parties on the green-awning’d

porch, weed midnights—butt-smoke, frost-breath, gun-
stocked West Philly cops stop to shock us with looks as
we loiter, amused— moments later I’d drag Mary into
her wood-floored bedroom & frivolously fuck her, hoping
Josh & Kevin might spy us. One time on whiskey Mary’s
diaphragm got stuck inside her, I felt it, fucking her, we
laughed, Mary’s hair then was long down to her ass, raucous,
randy. Diana remained unrevealed as she revealed herself
in the next room, ready to lead me, always, to my doom.
Golden apogee— everyone hot— everyone fucking,
painting, making music, boozing, drugging, sucking, humping,
leaning on nothing but the night’s promise, our nexus the nexus,
our moment the moment, all now reduced to ash, nothing but
a shut window, a fiery memory of an open one—

© Adam Fieled 2005-2025

The 2005, draft version of 4325 was published in Many Mountains Moving in 2005

More from 42 Opus

WHEN I FIRST SEE THE DEAD DEER

When I first see the dead deer, I think
Hope and Remembrance.
It's not the cluster of pinks I'd wanted,
not the first sight of the first crocus,
but a bouquet nonetheless.

Touching the furred foreleg where it juts
from the broken ribcage, it's
how perfectly still the leg lies, and
what a strange arrangement— how like a stem
it is for the whorl of bones and hair,
just uncovered by the melting snow.

Later, when I smell it on my hands,
I touched a man in love, and
what strange confessions the dead make.
Look how the blooms lie frozen still,
in the not-quite spring, in the shapes
of tubers, rhizomes, bones.

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

From Caffeine Destiny

ENTROPY

The night, the windows all crash
in their frames. I'm not the shambled

aftermath or the boy-girl order.
Spaces between us are not spaces

at all but a thousand blue flowered
nightgowns. You haven't yet learned

to discern the shape of things according
to your tongue. Heavy cumulous hang

the sky like sheets from a line
and entire alphabets go missing.

In the dark, a woman's teeth
flicker on and off. We'll decide

who's leaving by a scientific method
and the rule of light bulbs and iceboxes.

My skin exudes enough lumen for boxwoods to glow.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

From 42 Opus

DAILY MADONNA

Don't forget to do your daily Madonna.
Wake up and pat your womb before the light
gets in your window; you don't know what
the day will have in store.

You could be sweeping the stairwell, unaware
all this time that discipline was discipline.
You didn't know that using turnips
would win you favor, that saving rainwater
in the barrel would make anyone happy.

Someone likes it when you take the wilted stems to the heap
and churn them in. Someone likes it when you're patient
with bumblebee-weed, when you know that purslane is purslane,
and good to eat, and even when you let the grass
grow longer than it should.

Someone saw you carry the feathers of the jay the cat killed
and lay them on the fencepost, in hopes
another bird would use them for a nest, saw you smile
before you threw the gathered walnut hulls
into the woods, instead of weeping.

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Something Solid, Aughts Philly, "Live Forever"

We had it then— not just the embedded depth
of soul love, but glamour right on the ground,
as the formation formed by which Mary & I spent
all of our nights together. Our route— West
Philly to Logan Square and back— took two
disparate locales, made them whole, out of
a sense that they were meant to be wed, just
as we were; Logan Square with its sleek, modish
urbanity, West Philly with its rusticity, climbing
ivy, plus the obvious inversion of a well-worn
media cliché against it. By New Years Eve, 2003,
there was so much gaiety in the air, we’d pierced
a hole in the obdurate, obtrusive surface of human
life, to find ourselves in a tropical paradise—

I relate to it, now, as a clear demonstration that
Heaven on Earth happens. In Abby, we had a soul
sister; in the large co-op twin on Baltimore Ave.,
a safe haven; my flat in Logan Square created
a different, representatively recent kind of stage;
all were playgrounds where the dope, pills, every
thing else was shared by all, as all of our bodies
were for each other and no one else. The profound
ecstasy of that New Years was that a bunch of
artistic misfits found ways & means of being
completely at home in the world, against constraints
that needn’t have been there, with a serene sense
of what it might mean to live forever. We were
right, then and there, to be who we were, & we knew it—

© Adam Fieled 2022

Something Solid comes up, among other lit topics, in this new interview in TAS.

From Eoagh 3

SORRY

I can’t remember the 2nd
time I hurt you—

it was dark & someplace
in that darkness
was the thing I did.

You weren’t the target, I
know that, though
you might’ve been the bow
& the tension
I really think is love.
Nothing ever sends me away.
I’ve got your pain
in my pocket &
it glows in the dark

and in the light
it’s the softest kind
of singing woman’s voice.
That’s who you are. To me, I mean.
Let me hold your shoulders
back so you look
arrogant & beautiful
welcoming me into the warm
sad party. Let this
be the unfortunate hat
I hang outside the door
if only you will
allow me to come in.

© Eileen Myles 1979

More from moria poetry

PRECISION ENTRANCES
             (For H.D.)

Ethereal jellyfish
knotted garden
pearl vision of a
waking bridge
quiet transitory gully
screaming and sunlit
tides of dream
seeds in the ground
oyster abounding
the delphic charioteer
flies right into the mulberry symphony
trance skeleton drunk in the vineyard.

© Carrie Hunter 2004

From Dusie 5

WE’RE LOVING IT

Night arcs add to a continuous sense
of April, of this year. Please welcome.

To the pink pages, thank you;
thank you parasol, thank you fuzzy voiced
at the mike. Thank you, ice in a glass.

The road is a method, or a line joining
one possible former with a likely latter,
like a ladder.

And yes, the sky is blue,
& it can be photographed.

Our official position is class piñata.
Our innermost breaks.

© Shanna Compton 2006

From Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks

METROPOLITAN AVENUE DANCE NO. 1

I will myself into a bird. I might be a sparrow
or a robin or a broken plate. I might

not be any of these things. I might hide
in the shed or sing a wicked song.

I might sing e-i-e-i-o. I will myself
an audience— everyone claps or sings or

does nothing. I will myself into a frame,
tuck in my arms, my legs. Perhaps I begin

again, this time with a partner. Partner says
you sing a wicked song.

Partner says sparrow, dish-plate, birdsong.
Partner says, no, no, you’re doing it wrong.

© Gina Myers 2006

From moria poetry

obedience: 136

there is only infinity of jealous passion
tireless devotion walled in blindness
multiple poverty of substance
a poverty of property
a discourse of laughter
an action cutting across the self
stripped of
nothing but its fiction
of a fiction
of an absolute
timeless external organ
thing least compromised

a thought between a thought
the sun
between gladly becoming
words with an always message
touching a passing touching
a moment of touching
a passing moment
touching
the moment
never missing the missing

© Kari Edwards 2005

From Caffeine Destiny

INSTABILITIES

Azaleas bloomed, inky against the fence,
and all the porch lights loosened. Women
named Alice or Ingrid smoked in clamorous
rooms with long windows, their spines opening
to back roads and folksongs. We had thought
ourselves in love with thirst, whether or not
the sky opened and showed us its teeth. We
dreamt of beheadings, antebellum skirts,
power lines crossing & recrossing; the atmosphere
frenzied as the letters of our names. All along,
we thought we were in love with the weather.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): from Something Solid, Aughts Philly, Unhinged

Because you could cut paper with Anastasia’s cheek-bones,
& her wide hips supported no flab at all, & not to say
her carriage announced any movements but a feline strut,
a surfeit of attention is what she was used to. She paced
the polished wooden Highwire floors, knocked
back red wine, huffed nitrous, & put up the requisite
inaccessible, impervious front to those foolhardy enough
to believe they could approach her. I, for instance,
knew the ropes, & had too much to do anyway. Except,
at some point in one fateful night’s festivities, all the junk
in Anastasia’s brain, everything frozen, lazy-loafing,
shy of approach, froze— nights spent following other people
around, waiting to be signaled, signals sent back registering
ranking, surfeits of attention delivering not love but lust—

caught up with her at last, & she exploded. Gaetan
was exasperated to find her sitting in one of the windows
of the gallery’s west-facing façade, threatening to jump.
Gaetan was a cool customer, but spur him with something
unhinged, he would warp into warrior mode, brusquely
brush off those inexpert, & set to work. We all watched
as Gaetan leveled with Anastasia, whose drunkenness
was not helping her, leading her to understand that
the situation was hardly hopeless. She had a real life,
friends, purpose, & everyone here cared about her.
The party, as an entirety, you would think ceased, yet
it did not. Not all the revelers realized the drama unfolding.
Even those who did drunkenly chose to trust Gaetan. I
did, too, was right to. Philly fixed Jersey that night, as was its wont.

© Adam Fieled 2024-2025

Read more of The Spurgin Chronicles in The Seattle Star and Scud.

From As=Is

From The Book of How

how they picked their role-model companies
how you would launder money and hide it
how they help each other overcome their personal weaknesses by relying on the other’s personal strengths
how corrections were made by striking out a faulty passage in ink and stamping the correction in the margin
how private detectives make up stories on the spot and have to adjust
how to force people to download PDF documents (or other formats) rather than
how he got drunk and threw up
how the therapist evaluates and interprets dreams phantasies etc. in the absence of a personal analysis
how everything actually started
how to avoid disastrous (and embarrassing)
how ice cream came to be
how to tackle instead
how you became a travel editor
how they see them of how they interpret their gestures
how to traverse it
how your mother and everybody knows you were
how she came to write it
how the "inertia of history"
how to actually construct the park what materials you will need and how to acquire
how the various borderline thinking mechanisms work
how amphibians contribute to human medicine
how much the Air Force truly knew about the UFO phenomenon in the 1960's
how to succeed in science
how fragile he really is despite all
how pissed you were
how a sleeve should look like
how the primitive envious feelings are revived
how people see
how her life drifted into drug use and general lack
how he runs upstairs at midnight after a new show to read the reviews
how changes in the grammar of a unit within
how a university responds
how things got so messed up would be a small book

© Andrew Lundwall 2008