Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Collage"
As the blonde painter built towards a caterwauling
climax of charismatic presence, her brain constructed
itself all over again. Everything in Mary’s past which
could be used to self-mythologize would be used—
that was taken for granted— but the tack taken was
about a jumble of dynamic elements, never needing to
coalesce into coherence, which would make her as larger
than life as she wanted to be. The unfathomable sense,
after this many years, of taking the raw materials Mary
employed & attempting to understand what was real, what
wasn’t, can be easily replaced by understanding that grist
for the mill was grist for the mill for Mary then, & anything
went. True dynamism meant that if half-stories became
full stories and vice versa, that was fine, as long as the whirling
dervish effect was achieved, birthing the Mary-as-hurricane
she wanted to be. Whether her father really was a drunken
lout in private, a philanderer, or even a lover of his daughters,
no one really needed to know. The serpent of that story
unleashed itself, and then self-consumed. Mary as someone
who, in drunken and drugged stupor, had been hit by a car
somewhere near Media, also disgorged itself in the melee, along
with the sense of enfranchisement around being hospitalized
for general insanity. Mary had been propositioned by street-kids
in Spain; had trod the boards in Massachusetts as a professional
hippie, on a New England commune; had random sexual
encounters in sleeping bags in airports; ran away from home
several times as a teenager; was a pioneer in the discovery of
oxycontin; was an out of control storm. The myth was a collage.
Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Russian Roulette"
The vagaries of semi-transgression— I at least gave
myself credit for waiting until the semester ended.
Add this, I thought, to my scorecard of offenses
generated in the licentious Aughts. Who Julia was,
sprung from Glenside into Pine Street not unlike
myself, had an inner ache to write that itched
painfully, so that she took solace from a literary
lover who had been her teacher. Raven-haired
sitter-on-my-shoulder, she carried back to Glenside
even then who I was, had become. Narratives
from her own life made the ache burn into
full-out licentiousness, so that she threw what
she was at me in a cloud of turbulent cuteness,
drunken— drunkenly staged— but permanent.
She should’ve been a redhead, I thought,
as she drew the blinds, locked the red wine
in the cabinet, drained her glass, & bounced
into bed— not precisely the Don Juana of
her postures, more like a vision of Pre-Raphaelite
schizophrenia, as one reads in Victorian novels.
Writing this, after twenty years, it seems dulcet,
peaceful, rather than a plunge into a life or death
game of Russian Roulette, which is what it was
for us. The book I’d just published sat on the
living room sofa, as if there could be any other
reason for all this, the wine, the bullets; what I
put into her was another kind of book. The full
dome effect, for her, caused a thousand suicides.
Thanks again to Vlad Pogorelov and the rest of the Monday Journal crew, for all the hard work they've put into Monday Journal #2. In the interest of literary completism, here is Monday Journal #1 (2019) on Amazon.
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