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A failed literary self is reduced to nausea, beer, repetition, and one distant scene that cannot be recovered in language.

The title promises literature, but the body gives a sick stomach, worm-like drinking, and days counted in bottles. The Pittsburgh woman singing radio Hungarian near the bookshelf feels like the kind of charged detail a writer would want to preserve, yet the poem ends by admitting it is impossible to repeat. That failure gives the piece its force: memory exists, but art cannot quite hold it.

'THE ALMOST IN LITERATURE': a sick-stomach drinker confides 'with sick stomach I drink / beer lining my belly of a worm', counting 'my days in forty bottles' beside 'the pittsburgh woman / singing radio hungarian / near the wide distance / of the bookshelf', a scene 'impossible to repeat'.

The title names the poem's own shortfall: this is only 'almost' literature, and the body proves it by giving nausea, 'belly of a worm', and days measured in bottles instead of pages. The speaker 'sink[s] to think to quit' rather than writes, and the bookshelf hovers at a 'wide distance' as the unreachable standard the drink has already lost to. The Pittsburgh woman 'singing radio hungarian' is the charged, half-recovered image a writer would want to keep, yet the closing 'impossible to repeat' admits art cannot hold it - the memory exists but won't translate, like a song already carried twice from its origin. The lowercase 'i', 'pittsburgh', and 'hungarian' are kept as the scan shows them.