A liquor store with a linoleum floor is about as unromantic a setting as a love poem could choose, and Adam Fieled makes that flatness work for him. The opening lines move like a camera across a bare, practical space before settling on one remembered detail: the wine "she chose" was "always deep red, / dark, bitter aftertaste." That "always" matters. It suggests a habit, a shared routine, so the speaker is already looking back, and the poem's tense slips between memory and the present as the feeling refuses to stay in the past.
The central idea arrives with a turn. The wine is bitter, "unlike her bare torso, / which has in it / all that ever was / of drunkenness." The real intoxicant is not the drink but the person. The claim is extravagant ("all that ever was"), but the poem then redefines drunkenness in a way that has nothing to do with pleasure. After the dash come two infinitive phrases with no main verb to govern them: "to miss someone terribly, / to both still be in love." Drunkenness here is dizziness, longing, being unable to stand steadily in the world. The grammar mirrors the feeling, since the thought is never completed, only named. The small word "both" does a lot of work. The love has not died on either side, and that is exactly what hurts.
The next lines are the poem's most careful. "As / she severs things because / she thinks she must": the line break after "as" leaves the reader hanging, as if the speaker hesitates before saying the next part. "Severs" is a hard, surgical verb, its sibilance close to a hiss, and it makes the break-up sound like a cut rather than a drifting apart. Yet the speaker doesn't accuse. The phrase "she thinks she must" quietly doubts her certainty, but gently. He neither blames nor agrees. He only observes that she acts out of belief rather than desire.
"Exquisite torture" is the poem's oxymoron, pairing refinement with agony, and it fits the drunkenness metaphor, since both pleasure and pain are present at once. There is also a sound-link underneath. "Torture" sits right beside "torso," and the shared "tor-" opening makes the body and the pain seem to grow from the same root. Then the poem turns the mirror around: "a different bare torso, / (my own) that's incarnadine." The repeated "bare torso" lets us see two bodies side by side, hers as a source of intoxication, his as a place of damage. The parentheses around "my own" feel like a reluctant admission, something tucked away and almost not said.
"Incarnadine" is the most elaborate word in a poem of otherwise plain speech, and it lands at the very end. It means a fleshy, blood-red colour, and it carries the Latin sense of flesh, close to "carnal." Readers may know it from Shakespeare's *Macbeth*, where seas turn red, though the poem doesn't need that echo to work. What matters is the way the red returns. The wine was "deep red"; now the speaker's own body is red, whether from a flush, a wound, or the stain of drink. The word keeps all three possibilities open. The metaphor completes itself: she was the wine, and he is what it leaves behind.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. Its short lines break the thought into small, hesitant pieces, and enjambment keeps pushing the sense across the gaps ("floor," "was," "as," "because"). Sound does the work that rhyme might otherwise do: the hard consonants in "deep red, dark, bitter aftertaste" give the wine a harsh edge. The two dashes frame the central passage, and the second one ends the poem, so there is no full stop. The sentence simply trails off, which suits a relationship that hasn't reached any peace. Judging by the title's number, this may be one fragment in a long sequence, and that feels right for a mood that keeps returning.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it overturns a familiar cliché. Wine is supposed to dull heartache; here the heartache is the drunkenness, and the hangover is the loss. It also gives no reasons or backstory for the parting. By staying with the body, the bitterness, and one reddening final word, it makes its ache feel immediate in fifteen short lines.