Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Black Mattress"

I.
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.

II.
What we had done, running forward on
the black mattress, was about a place, time
that wasn’t all black at all. Where you
could’ve settled in State College then concerned
mastery of contexts. Within reason, kids
who had in them that lascivious lawlessness
which meant what it meant for Emily & I—
keep the volume down, you can get away,
albeit briefly, with murder— the black
mattress of human savagery against
raw reality was always there,
but could be contravened. This, we did.
Emily’s voodoo, an invocation of gorgeous
lawlessness, a garden of secret green.

© Adam Fieled 2017-2025

Black Mattress I was originally published as Voodoo in Otoliths 47 in 2017.