Adam Fieled


Voodoo

From my second-floor sublet on
West Nittany Avenue, I’m sure you
looked out at autumn State College with
a mystical sense that your spell was being
cast: hydrochloride pot, cigarettes,
the rest that was you, splayed out in
a posture that, somewhere, you had
already mastered; the spell was against
all the run-in-circles crew, “sororisluts,”
footballers, frat-packs, the anti-human,
anti-humane; what sutured our skin
together ripped them to shreds, in
your mind, as it was cast out (black
mattress); using voodoo I missed, bewitched.



Harrisburg

I sat in a Greyhound bus-
terminal in Harrisburg, &
Stephanie Holt stood
twenty paces to my left; had,
suddenly, materialized there;
skin glazed, forehead protruding,
as though she had philosophical
issues with reality… that night
back in Cheltenham, I’d sat in
a car outside her mansion,
waiting for the deal to happen
inside I barely knew was there—
“looped in the loops of her hair”
I was not; not a word in Harrisburg.



Cupboard

Jet brow shaded, furrowed hard,
Julia went down on me so far
as to become invisible, so far
gone I lost her, stopping to block
a shot I didn’t realize I’d fired—
she grew up a Cheltenham liar—
they’ve got, I thought, Julia’s double
locked away in a cupboard somewhere
in Glenside, in a house I used to
run past when I ran cross-country
in high school, burning a four hour
high from a fifteen minute race. Now,
the high was ten seconds, & completely
anonymous— the cupboard was her.



Jen Green

As to where in human life there may
be glamour; it hung in the Last Drop
air for the Aughts— palpable, radiant,
& also simple as being able to smoke
joints in the adjacent alleyways. It
was a party; the right individuals did
treat it as such. Now, it’s all white,
the color of skinned bone. I try to
imbibe, taste sulfur in the air;
enchantment to damnation’s stare.
Jen Meese— the Drop’s early Aughts
resident sex kitten— disappeared in
’05— did I find her picture here, under
some paper towels in the bathroom?



Recondite

It seemed not recondite at the time,
on that much acid, in the dead of
night, in an icy winter, with perhaps
a foot of snow on the ground, to
find one’s self in a van in a parking
lot in State College, with your friend’s
sister, as ska bands blurted out their
numbers in the adjacent ballroom;
it seemed natural. I drifted into her,
pushed, pulled, someone cackled from
outside the van, I woke still in the van
with her in my arms before daybreak.
On the trudge back, through snow & ice,
to North Halls, I saw God through a grate.




Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. His books include Posit (Dusie Press, 2007), Opera Bufa (Otoliths, 2007), Beams (Blazevox, 2007), When You Bit… (Otoliths, 2008), Apparition Poems (Blazevox, 2010), Cheltenham (Blazevox, 2012), and Cheltenham Elegies/Keats Odal Cycle (Gyan Books, 2015). A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he also holds an MFA from New England College and an MA from Temple University.
 
 
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