Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Power Yoga"

The way it had been, in the realm of benevolent decadence,
power yoga, for Mary and I, had been about a pulverizing
impulse to get as high as possible, and to achieve as much
ecstasy along with it. This had been accomplished with
the jouissance of two equals, who were equally bandits
about trouncing day-to-day life with levitational exercise.
Now, days and months passed in which I was always asked
to pick Mary up at a Walnut Street Studio, up in the 40s,
parallel to Baltimore, after she spent a few hours baking in
a room heated up to ninety degrees, doing yoga poses in
tights, or other leotard outfits, which tended to emphasize
her extreme leanness, testimony to a noodles-n-vegetables
diet, unbalanced by the emergence of fats or proteins. I was
asked to eat dessert, when I did, on my own. I always found

funny, that the idea of power yoga, in an Arizona-simulation
room, gave Mary the sense that her physical mechanism was
cared for. We still did some levitational tasks. But power yoga
was adumbrated for her along with her membership in Mariposa,
West Philly’s organic food co-op of choice, making it a clean
sweep for vegan Mary to holistically redeem her years of excess.
Mary was eager for me to try power yoga myself. I demurred,
along my own party lines, well-worn ones, that power walking
all over Center City did the task I needed to do of keeping my
own mechanism in shape. The mood of the Aughts in Philadelphia
had begun to dissipate. Now it was or seemed to be, every
individual for themselves. The real power yoga we did together
was to understand that Mary’s family was keeping a tight rein
on her. No meandering forward on an endless road. We were a stretch.

© Adam Fieled 2026