Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "4325 Baltimore Avenue"
Jason cooking flounder on a filthy range, fish picked
up at 40th and Walnut where Penn students mingled
with artists, Chomsky-ites, bums, and mothers. Where, also,
French bread for two bucks we’d carry around for
walks home down rustic, mansion’d streets. Fish-wafts
filled the lovably threadbare kitchen laden with mustard
and crumbs. Mary’s Acme-purchased pesto pasta, Olive-oil
Goddess, she’d make a pot on pot in a pot and we’d
have a bowl from the pot watching hot French-flicks
in the lived-in living room. Paintings, Mary’s evocations
Dionysus and Apollo, Jason post-Dali post-structuralist
Dada and Derrida derived violences, submitted to smitten
PAFA judges, originals all flecked with little chips from
the falling ceiling leaned on the walls. 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 and frivolously fuck her, hoping
Josh and Kevin might spy us. One time on whiskey Mary’s
diaphragm got stuck inside her and 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, early-draft version of 4325 was published in Many Mountains Moving in 2005
up at 40th and Walnut where Penn students mingled
with artists, Chomsky-ites, bums, and mothers. Where, also,
French bread for two bucks we’d carry around for
walks home down rustic, mansion’d streets. Fish-wafts
filled the lovably threadbare kitchen laden with mustard
and crumbs. Mary’s Acme-purchased pesto pasta, Olive-oil
Goddess, she’d make a pot on pot in a pot and we’d
have a bowl from the pot watching hot French-flicks
in the lived-in living room. Paintings, Mary’s evocations
Dionysus and Apollo, Jason post-Dali post-structuralist
Dada and Derrida derived violences, submitted to smitten
PAFA judges, originals all flecked with little chips from
the falling ceiling leaned on the walls. 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 and frivolously fuck her, hoping
Josh and Kevin might spy us. One time on whiskey Mary’s
diaphragm got stuck inside her and 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, early-draft version of 4325 was published in Many Mountains Moving in 2005
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