Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "High Ceilings"

And was it accursed to the eons, for a whole lot
of people, that it should be that way? I am thinking
of the January night in Logan Square, when Mary
and I first went nuptial. That it was so raw, so real,
so about hungry people being able to feed, and being
so against the starving, threadbare multitudes, lost in
mutilated lives— accursed to the eons? It was everything
we’d have to pay for, that’s for sure. But the way the Nineties
worked, Mary and I both found time to become educated
semi-avatars at the big fleshly discipline. My main route
or thoroughfare was that, right on the surface. State College
saw me, in fact, emerge as a sexualized, not really scamp,
sub-scamp or post-scamp. Mary’s route was more twisted,
around John, and into other turf. Guys in her business who

had a sense of mercy for the artist in her, were willing to
go the distance with her, teach her the ropes, bring her
up to speed, so that even then Byron for her had to be
a composite. The sense of anonymity around her coming
of age was clouded also by intoxication, by associating
the carnal with the clouded torpor of being high. She
never talked too much, in later times, about the sense
of pedagogical interest she inspired. Yet it was clear,
by the enfranchised January night, that she knew herself
in a way womanly, not girlish, and that the rigors of
mattress-thumped satiety were accompanied for her
with familiarity. Not to mention, also, entitlement,
the sense that she deserved a physical self conversant
in ecstasy, well-roundedness. Houses with high ceilings.

© Adam Fieled 2026