By Morgan Levine
On the train thinking of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17
1 a certain genre: stories by and about passengers of collisions. Literature in the vessel of death. 2 guilt, which is more interesting and unserious than feeling guilt, which is interminable. 3 movies as the opposite of poetry – or combining with poems to be the entirety of it. 4 Gertrude Stein who knew anything vague enough is true. 5 “it” being objectively the world and subjectively a van with YES DEAR INC. painted on the side somewhere near White Plains. 6 opposites being always more similar than they are different, i.e. left and right are both directions, so left is not opposite of “chair” or “Gertrude Stein.” 7 sitting on a bench and sensing words against your back so turning to read one of those memorial plaques dedicated to someone’s grandmother who knew everything grows with love. What do you do with that? 8 movies and poems which may be completely in your head or completely out of your head but still they happen to you. 9 the season photographing itself through the window: guiltless sun loud over the trees, who reject the gaze but take the light. 10 a culpable sun; the culpable moon; your culpable chair; my culpable Gertrude Stein. 11 some raptor-like feeling, or the opposite of a raptor, which is introspection. 12 the disappearance of models from painting, then the disappearance of models from writing. 13 the absurd planes of friends’ faces, who have all become films, thus coming closer to poems on the universal scale. 14 a poem in the Cubist style. 15 a poem cast in the old way, with the correct positions. 16 memory operating as a lamppost, so that your signs were (and may be) everywhere inscribed. 17 it again.