Mary Harju '18

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "On Love"

What tide is the realest, which pulls in a kiss?
     The rigor of reaching the thing-in-itself,
from subject to object, chaos to bliss,
     our frail intuition of heavenly health?
Our love is not molecules, dumbly colliding,
     nor is it knowledge, formal and static,
         nor is it accident, reasoned and plumbed—
it's real, meta-rational, soaring and gliding,
     felt like an earthquake, bringing up panic,
         taking our parts and achieving a sum.

The greater part of love is sacrifice—
     flesh intermingled, tensing (push!) tingled,
this is the secret I learn from your eyes.
     Giving my body, knotted, single,
tiny eruptions that come from my tongue;
     plunging down surfaces, slicking the flesh,
         thoughtless as leopards or hurricane winds—
watching you shudder, watching you come,
     rapt in the throes of an innocent death,
         giving my life to an inch of your skin.

Thus, we trade in secure oblivion
     for reckless reality, messy and fleeting.
Such is the cosmos— creation, carrion,
     motions of molecules merging and meeting.
Nothing is lost but notions of self-ness,
     hard ideations that close and clatter,
         rages of ego that strain at their walls—
nothing is gained but a sense of the deathless,
     "there-ness" of spirit, "there-ness" of matter,
         ultimate "there-ness" that scares as it calls.

© Adam Fieled 2003-2025

Eratio 26: The White Album (2nd Edition)

The new issue of Eratio (26) features, in its entirety, the second edition of the e-book The White Album, initially released by Ungovernable Press in 2009.

Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Marble"

“You little paranoid bitch, doesn’t it ever
bother you that you’re incapable of having
relationships? You tell me you “feel awful all
the time,” don’t you think there’s a reason for it?”
Digging in to half a century, on what’s literally
my fiftieth birthday, it occurs to me what a gyp
to whole thing really is, for me, Abby, & the rest—
try to do a little good work, they’ll always find
a reason to hang you. That last time Abby was
splayed out on my floor, once I’d moved into
a less idyllic, low-ceiling’d flat, no sex, just the sense
that the wall between us was insurmountable, on
every level. She left her bike in front of my building.
I spent her tirades composing an answer in my head,

putting her on tape, as she was supposed to be
talking about Mary. She was being naughty, talking
about herself. Late summer, bedraggled, just as this
February day is bedraggled by extreme cold, Plymouth
Meeting under ice-sheets under ice-sheets, the East
Coast gasping for heat. The tapes, precious ones, got
dumped when I moved out here. No getting them
back. Just the sense, on my birthday, that the real
present has to be that I ever heard her voice at all,
in a world full of promising circuits never established,
incendiary matches never made. So Abby felt awful
all the time, and why shouldn’t she? Like everyone
else worth a damn, she missed the ticket to her own
enfranchisement. But the last almost-fuck is now marble.

© Adam Fieled 2026