Glass Doors

It isn’t difficult for me to imagine why it might

be that, outward action done for the night, Abby

would stand outside Mary’s glass-paneled,

completely curtained double doors, & listen to

us making love. All this time later, I see it as

a manifestation-in-action of The Lost Twins,

from Abby’s own vaunted masterpiece, rising

to the surface of Abby’s brain, & asserting their

presence. The male-leaning twin laughs at all

the pushing & grunting, the sleazy cheesiness

of what I have between my legs (she has one too),

as though I thought it made me big in the world

(it did not) to bang away at Mary as if the world

depended on it. The profound dumbness of sex

& sexual intercourse mixed with the pride of her

own phallic presence in the world, doing an even

more manly routine of being split, being two

people at once, and making both of them thrust

through the surface of human life, into art

taken from two places, willed into brilliant

singularity, in a way the grunting moron could

never understand. The male-leaning twin wins.

The real girl twin remains a coy maiden, building

up the guts to let herself into bed with me,

jealous of Mary’s easy submissiveness, as though

to the manner born, of letting the man be the man,

however dumb, & riding the waves towards twin

peaks, rather than Lost Twins, behind glass doors.

Adam Fieled is a writer based in Philadelphia. His books include Equations, Opera Bufa, and Apparition Poems. Manuscripts-in-progress include Something Solid, Letters to Dead Masters, and A Poet in Center City. A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.