The Editors

We started experiments to do

with context. The way events

were perceived in context.

Also syntax. Benign interlopers.

To statements made in order

we introduced disorder. It even

felt like a rupture. Violent formal

gesture despite benign content.

Some of which had to do with beauty.

Some of which had to do with who

could twist beauty but no one could

recreate the sentences.

Each colorless device might have

been called pink or yellow or green

but the cards on which they were

typed are lost. Or fragments.

Whether or not a beauty

is benign. The point at which

game becomes ritual you’ve made

a more useful game but to whom.

You would call the fragment

a kind of violence but not

because of its importance

to the editors’ choreography.

Here would be a decent place

to examine one of the cards

but no. As I said lost but what

if we woke not always

with the annoyance

of having glimpsed worlds

we’ve no tools to describe.

Who dislikes evidence

and how beautiful. What if one

of us were called Friend

and the other Friend of Friend.

What if we could explain

the marble cube at the center

of town and its function as a kind

of stage. Of literal chopping block

the editors used for others’ phrases.

Who was the architect of reading

cards out of order. Monochrome

and no clue. His radical

idea and hers. We went looking

for radical once and found only

roots. We rendered each period

as a tiny heart and the relative

size of each heart allowed

us to measure our level

of attachment to each sentence.

Even to the font. To the root.

Still no content and it drove

some of us to despair. Others

to rhythm. To regroup

and to rename the cards. Yes yes

yes instead of each period a heart.