Adam Fieled

3 poems

from Apparition Poems


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#509

There are gusty showers
...in Philadelphia, showers
that beat up empty lots,

down in sooty Kensington,
...you could almost believe
what the books say about

being-in-the-world, I mean
...being in a damned world, it
really does seem that way

on greasy days in Philadelphia.


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#571

Of course, there had to be
a pretty nurse— this one was
pale blonde, thin, always in
jeans, fat iron cross affixed
to breast-heavy chest. I
couldn’t ignore eye-teeth
that made her look like a
vampire. In my pill-popped
dementia, I saw her kneel
beside my bed, swill blood
from my neck, nourish
herself on my sickness.
In swoons, a Christian
vampire seems no weirder
than enforced Twister,
watched Monopoly, or
face-painting forty-year-olds:
she fit right in. That’s the bin.


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#1617

Philosophy says that poets want to lose.
What are conditions of losing: to whom?
The conditions (to whom they concern, to

unrepresented phantoms, mostly) are colors,
which, to transcribe, require a solid core of
nebulous necromancy which philosophy calls

(for its own poetic reasons) “loss.” I took this
from one strictly (which necessitated looseness
towards me) for himself, took several median

blended colors and painted a razor on the roof
of a red building. Then I fell off. But I lived.


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return to sawbuck 5.2

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Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. His latest book is Disturb the Universe: The Collected Essays of Adam Fieled (Argotist e-books, 2010). He has work in Jacket, PennSound, Poetry Salzburg Review, Tears in the Fence, and in the &Now Awards Anthology from Lake Forest College Press. He teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia.