Emiland Kray, L’ambroise de Lotito: On Disordered Eating and a Connection Stronger than Life and Death | L*STS

   

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L’ambroise de Lotito: On Disordered Eating and a Connection Stronger than Life and Death

Emiland Kray

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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We’re not so different, you and I. In fact, I think we’re both hungry. A river of mineral oil lube cascaded through your pink fatty interior. How else would 9 tons of metal glide through miles of intestines? Maybe it was your unmatched gumption, you’re certainly not one to be underestimated. I’ve recently been imagining the terroir of gastric juices that slid over your tongue. Then I read about bicycle chains chomping gravel only then to have travelled down your throat 18 times. Did you lick the grease as well? This is food for the soul I thought while eating honeydew after vomiting a quart of bile. Food crunchy, food splinters, food divine. Did you savor the sawdust mouthfeel of your coffin?
     When I was sixteen or seventeen, I fainted onto a smooth tile floor with nothing to break my fall. My last memory is of the cyan blue fish tanks and cottonmouth, no doubt from the weed. I don’t know how long I lost consciousness. Would I wake up? My friends hovered over me as I came to while reclining on a tan sofa. I roused with a chipped tooth, a fractured jaw, and the skin under my chin hung like a tongue flapping helplessly against my neck. I was driven to a hospital where I was given 7 stitches and the demoralizing news that I would have to wait 6 months to eat solid food again. My first meal after my jaw healed had me gobbling baby carrots like there was no tomorrow. You were dead at this point, but if I could’ve, I would’ve feasted on 45 door hinges with you. Maybe we could’ve made it 46.  

But sometimes life just hands you the short straw, and not 1,600 feet of steel chain. Y’know? I used to hide while eating, and gnaw then spit until my jaw was sore. Or I would eat gallons of nothing, iceberg lettuce by the bucket, entire watermelons, huge servings of bananas. I think it was an oral fixation thingy. Like, I needed to grind and gnash nosh. I also brushed my teeth every time I got nervous, but that’s another problem for me to write about with another dead guy. Did you ever experience FOMO? I felt it a little with trail mix. Whenever I would grab a handful, I would organize the trail from the mix. One row of sunflower kernels, another of gold raisins, another of walnuts, another of pumpkin seeds, then another, and another, and another. I’d do anything to avoid actually putting them inside of my mouth. When I decided to finally fold, I would eat them in a ratio of perfection. 1 walnut, 4 sunflower seeds, 3 pumpkin seeds, 2 raisins. It would take me about two hours to eat a handful of nuts. This was disordered eating, and you knew this too. I would bite and taste, but never swallow, and you ate a waterbed and then two regular beds. How did you portion out all of the little plastic bitties?
     Rumors started though, when my weight dropped too much. Ew, I can see your ribs through your back! my sister yelled when I was stretching one day. I never saw the bones that she claimed existed. To this day, I have no memory of what I looked like in the mirror. Instead I have a pungent feeling, and urge to pinch my fat and encircle my thigh with hateful, measuring hands. I feel a fear of the bathroom mirror and being naked. It is not an urgent fear though, but it’s a white noise that peeks around corners and appears when the fork tines turn into dosing rods. Our physical differences couldn’t keep us apart, my bones would rattle so sweetly against the lining of your heart and your rotting gums. Thick skin, thick intestinal lining, shit dude, you even had crazy strong teeth. Do you think that’s because you ate 7 television sets? Or do you think you were destined for greatness? The rumors about you, though, are much more tantalizing. Like the time you ate an entire airplane, you fucking rockstar. How could you eat that all alone when all I wanted was a dinner for two? Maybe I can spit up my trail mix to season your food. Can you imagine pustules of raisins dripping down the glittering bodies of 6 chandeliers? It’s appetizing, isn’t it? Ever kiss with tongue while you’re having acid reflux? Asking for a friend.

But this is all to invite you, or perhaps your ghost to my last meal. It might give you a tummy ache, but I want to drink a flight of root beers and jet fuel with you. Can we reminisce about eating and not eating? I can tell you all about how my ex-boyfriend's mom made the most delicious pico de gallo (heavy on the lime juice), and I would eat it by the bowl! And you can tell me about eating shopping carts. I can tell you about how I kind of want to eat human flesh, a thigh, breast, or maybe rump. Maybe we can even discuss if sucking dick counts. Masticating or masturbating? Amirite?! And we can talk about the look in someone’s eye when you turn down food, or when you eat a pair of skis. The wetness of near tears pooling and cupping their eyes then tucked beneath the plumage of an eyebrow. Avalanches of furrows bake above their nose. Cheeks aquiver and flexing with thin tomato peel skin. Silence behind lips where you hear nothing as they swallow words and you swallow nothing. How you go to the bathroom after and pull up your shirt to examine your stomach. Then your belly button stares back at you, but you don’t remember the bones, you just remember feeling sadness and feeling thirsty, then wondering how you can be perfect and loved. And then you hold your breath on the scale, and bite your lip while pretending to bite an apple. How hunger is normal and desired. Food divine? Food evil. Food despicable. Food void. Food hate.

Please eat. I’m sure you’ve heard that too because we’re not so different, you and I.

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I am not unique in that while I grew up, I engaged in disordered eating. In a turbulent household, food was something that I felt that I could control, and with that came other experiences that put food and body image into different perspectives such as breaking my jaw after fainting. While doing research for L*sts, my initial idea was to make a list of my ideal last meal menu. The more and more I worked on it though the more uninspired I became. Then my coworker, Lee, mentioned this super cool guy who ate an entire airplane, and in that moment, I fell in love. His name was Michel Lotito (1950-2006). Upon actually looking up this superstar, he not only ate an entire Cessna 150 light aircraft, but his resume also includes: 45 door hinges, 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, 7 television sets, 6 chandeliers, 2 beds, 1 pair of skis, 1 computer, 1 copy of the textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorn, and Wheeler, 1 waterbed, 1,600ft of steel chain, 1 coffin (with the handles), 1 Guinness World Records plaque, and assorted razors and bolts. From there, the essay happened like a waterfall where the research lined up with my personal experiences of eating habits and disorders mixed with compulsions, disgusts, subversions and also a very human element of grief that comes along with engaging in self harm. This L*sts essay is a conversation beyond the grave between myself and Mr. Lotito where we maybe share a meal, gossip, and try each others’ favorite foods.

Emiland Kray is a visual artist, bookbinder, and writer working primarily with book arts and game design. His work investigates the complexities of memories, dreams, and fear by manipulating our attachment to the familiar and the nostalgic. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and in 2023 he received his MFA from the University of Arizona with a portfolio of traditional watercolor, book arts, and game design. Kray was the winner of a 2026 Standards of Excellence Award by the Guild of Bookworkers, a 2025 Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society, has work in notable special collections such as the Carnegie Mellon Library, Arizona Poetry Center, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections, and the Lilly Library in Indianapolis. Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and collaborative projects, through initiatives like Troctopus Press, The Octopus Anthology, and partnerships with several non-profits and public libraries throughout the American Southwest. With a focus on accessibility, you can find many of his books in libraries around the United States and find his games free to play online. Play some games | Look at some books

 

Patrick Madden, For the Last Time | L*STS

 

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For the Last Time

Patrick Madden

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited. . . . When we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining. —Samuel Johnson, “On Last Things”

A few weeks ago, before attending an academic conference in Norwich, England, I took a week to see the sights of London. A considerable portion of my time was spent visiting the haunts of Great Dead essayists, men such as Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. Rarely were the homes and churches emplaqued or otherwise noted. Aside from Joseph Addison, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, their graves were unprotected from the elements and mendicants such as myself. I tried halfheartedly to keep my antennae open to possibilities for writing, but I also just wanted to live like a tourist for a while, hoping that this would calm my nerves a bit, keep my mind off the long list of things I ought to have finished already, hold at bay the entropy that rushes up to take hold of my consciousness and drag it downward. It worked on that score; but like all such diversions, it lasted only as long as the traipsing about, and when I returned to real life, I felt again the abrumant weight of my responsibilities and obligations.
     So perhaps it’s no wonder that the story I grasped from my British wanderings is one of no consequence. What happened was I found my fly down after several hours of group tourism about the seaside at Southwold, the setting for parts of The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. The realization came in the subfloor men’s bathroom of the Elizabeth Fry Building at the University of East Anglia, during a break in the aforementioned conference. Mentally retracing my morning, I deduced that I must have left my pants unzipped from the moment I put them on (one leg at a time). I chuckled contentedly, half-worried that I’d exposed my white underwear or caused a colleague some momentary displaced embarrassment but half-pleased that I’d done it again. Nobody had asked me if I was afraid of heights. And I could not recall any untoward attentions or, worse, evasions, but how would I know? I zipped up, washed my hands, and returned to my day.
     I was left thinking, or am thinking now, about those events that punctuate the multivolume tome of our life, not with periods, not with question marks or exclamation points, but with commas, perhaps, or apostrophes, hyphens amid compound adjectives, colons before lists, the stuff that marks the way, making our reading make sense, workmanlike, by and large glossed over, unnoticed. How often are we stricken with hiccups? When will we need to clip our toenails again? When awaits us yet another crick in the neck? Or perhaps my mind is leaning toward the periods, the last times, farewells to small things, embarrassing things, things we should know better (or know better than to). When will we finally master our habits, overcome our shortcomings? Have we lost our keys for the last time? Can we be sure we won’t again leave our blinker on for miles and miles? Will we never again forget to take the garbage out to the curb? Have we seen the last of leaving our clothes in the washing machine until they mold or whatever it is that leaves us with stinkshirt, as my father calls it? What about the things we’ve very nearly mastered, like putting our shoes on the right feet or buttoning our shirt in proper correspondence? Can we ever be certain, even with advancing know-all technology to serve us, that we yet won’t leave our clocks unbacked or unforwarded? Or can we look forward to that amused discomfiture of showing up to church in the middle of the Mass before or after the one we’d intended to attend?
     This is the case with leaving my barn door open. I’ve done it often enough in the past—I know I have. Likewise, I expect I shall do it again. This is not the sort of mistake one learns from, not a sin one repents and forsakes. By its very nature, zipper negligence is unintentional and absentminded. And while I certainly have cultivated the habit of zipping up whenever I get dressed or finish at the urinal, my mind often wanders, so I can be almost certain that I will find my brageta abierta in the future. I have tried to resist the thought that invades my mind trailing this harmless event: that all is vanity, or life is futile, that despite our best efforts, we can never escape the small embarrassments we bring on ourselves as we struggle to keep track of it all, as we innocently ignore our vulnerabilities. What’s more, the older we get, the more likely we are to lose our fine-minded refinements, so the probabilities of oversights increase. And for all of that, we can never be sure that we’ve seen the last of such peccadilloes. It would be nice, in a way, to know when we’ve made our last little blunders, though there’s a charm in not knowing, too, a blissful ignorance that hides from us the ticking of the clock or the tallying of days and moments.
     Of course, at some point, known or unknown, each repeatable offense or harmless exercise must reach its final occurrence, such as what I’m quite sure was my father’s last backward bicycle ride. It happened at Notre Dame, on a sunny, carefree afternoon, after a pleasing swim in St. Mary’s Lake. Attendant characters, in addition to our protagonist, were my wife, Karina; my brother Dan (since I learned it, I have loved how my choice to include or omit commas indicates that I have only one wife and more than one brother); my four children—Pato, Adi, Sara, and Dani (who rode in a seat contraption on the back of her namesake uncle’s bike)—and I (riding tandem with Adi). We borrowed the bikes from the dormitory that operates as a hotel for alumni each summer. Dad and Dan (and Dani) were up ahead with Pato, impatient with Sara’s training-wheeled meandering. That left the rest of us back there in the shade, making slow progress amid the dirt and gravel, across small washouts and gullies, along the circular trail that rings the lake. As we crested the insubstantial hill into the vertical sunlight, I gathered in an almost-instantaneous scene: My brother paused and smiling at an island in the parking lot, holding the back-heavy bike holding Dani; my son lost somewhere among the scattered cars; my father sitting on his handlebars and facing his seat, feet on the pedals, neck craned, head turned toward me but eyes peripherating the path behind his back. He is headed toward a curb, moving too fast, turning not enough to avoid a collision. As the electric impulses zip from my eyes to my brain to my mouth to shout “Dad!” his front wheel jumps up and jerks right (his left) just onto the border grass and into the octagonal base of a light pole. Momentum is enemy; ballast is imbalance; a man set on his rump above the front wheel means only one thing: a glancing carom off the pole, the back wheel shooting up, my father twisting to brace his headlong tumble to the street below. But the bike is six inches above the asphalt, on the grass. His hands miss the soft turf by a horizontal six inches, so his head crashes helmetless to the street, crumpling under the accelerated weight of his body and the metallic contraption that traps his feet and legs.
     In a second, Dan and I were at his side, helping him up, assessing his injuries. He got to his feet easily enough, if a bit groggily, blinkingly, behind his scratched glasses a slow trickle of blood, on his upper lip a raw exposed layer of skin. We left the bike where it lay and held his hands to show him to a nearby bench, to sit and think on the event. Already the children and Karina were with us, the former on the verge of tears, the latter on the verge of laughter. A red-haired woman who saw the whole thing asked, obligedly, “Are you okay?” My father mumbled an affirmative, and she continued past. I made the group’s first attempt at lightening the gravitas: “She’s thinking, ‘Are you okay, you idiot?’”
     Dad perked up, “She said that?”
     “No,” I said, immediately regretting my move but forced to follow through, “but she must be thinking it.” I thought to check his hearing when I got the chance.
     Our own questions weren’t much more profound than the woman’s, but we were persistent, making sure he’d kept his bearings and didn’t feel too pained or otherwise untoward. He stood up well under our scrutiny, though Dan, gently removing Dad’s glasses, noticed a pulsing gash in the folds above his left eye.
     Perhaps this was a moment to consider mortality, to imagine the world without my father, but our conversation was a mixture of immediate plans and gentle ribbing. Dad wanted to be sure the borrowed bike wasn’t noticeably damaged, so he announced his plans to ride it back to the dorm. Dan, keen to try out a role reversal, caught his words and remonished, “Ride it back, not backward.” He and Karina snickered, while I, ashamed of my prior failed attempt at humor, tried to remain stoic. Karina assuaged the children’s contagious crying with shushes and whispers that “Grandpa’s going to be fine.” They didn’t believe her.
     But he was fine, all things considered, and so was the bike, so he did ride away, soon enough, with the rest of us alongside and behind, as he made it back to the dorm, then continued on to the hospital, where he omitted the “backward” detail in his explanation and found that he’d fractured his skull, an untreatable misfortune (stay out of the boxing ring is about all you can do for it), and then, in the coming days, traveled on to Milwaukee, his boyhood home, where a handful of cousins would relish his tale for its pure ridiculability.
     For as long as I have known my father, he has talked about the summer projects that he and his friends would take on: juggling, walking on their hands, riding their bikes backward. I tried it all but mastered only a fraction of his feats and never quite got the balance and rhythm to ride my bike sitting on my handlebars. This was yet one more way in which I would never be my father’s equal. So it was a mix of sadness and pride that I felt, later, when reminiscing with my wife and brother, to have witnessed Dad’s last backward ride, the exclamation point ending that particular thread of his life.
     I might have expected that I would twist out of my stories into braided meditations as soon as I set off to narrate, that I would, one might say, unzip from the constraints of chronicle into confabulation. It is a mode, I hope, not utterly unpleasant, as it gives both a recounting of events and an attempt at an ordering not only of chronologies but, as Lukacs says, of “souls and destinies.” God rest us both, my father and me, long into the hereafter, of course, but now, too, for brief snatches of peace amid all our self-created chaos, our ineluctable destinies of descent and decay.

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One of the fascinating things about last happenings is how seldom we recognize them or even remember them. With the now-middle-aged kids I grew up with, I often think nostalgically (on Facebook, mostly) about our idyllic childhood and how we never knew we were playing our last game of manhunt or building our last fort in the woods or jumping our bikes over each other for the last time. But all those things came to an end at some point, and we didn't think to lament their passing until much later. For this essay, the proximate occasion (noticing my zipper had been down all morning) gave rise to that line of thinking for insignificant things, which then brought me to what I was certain was the last time my father rode a bike backwards, which, because he was injured (not seriously) and some decades older than me, got me thinking about the inevitability of death and the irreversability of decay. Samuel Johnson showed up conveniently in my reading and provided an epigraph, and all that was left was some polishing and threading to make the essay seem whole.

Patrick Madden's newest essay collection is Recenses/Recencies (11/1/26), and he also wrote Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010). He co-edited Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years (2025) and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015) and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán (2012). He is co-editor of the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press, co-editor of the literary journal Fourth Genre, and vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference.

This essay originally appeared in Sublime Physick (2016).

Timothy Dyke, Lest List | L*STS

  

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Lest List

Timothy Dyke

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests

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lest I come across as arrogant

lest I remind him of the time he crashed my VW bug

lest he retreats to demon metaphors

lest the reference to palm forests triggers the Merwin digression

lest I misunderstood the assignment

lest she asks me for the hundredth time if I’m seeing anyone

lest he drops to his knees and starts praying for my salvation

lest they are out of lavender syrup

lest we accidentally run into each other in Safeway

lest anyone accuses me of using A.I.

lest it was the 50 mg and not the 10 mg

lest I am overcome by spiders

lest I am ever expected to compose a sonnet

lest they ask me to join their affinity group

lest proclamation of love becomes mistaken for act of love

lest you confuse Neil Diamond with Neil Sadaka 

lest you confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf

lest you confuse the Chris in the Star Trek movie

with the Chris in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie

lest this turns into one of those grief sessions where 

we are expected to hug and share feelings

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When I heard of the L*ST publication project, I knew I wanted to participate. I am drawn, as a reader and writer, to lists and to wordplay. I could not stop thinking about how versatile that L*ST construction is, and as I started replacing that asterisk with vowels, my brain zeroed in on the word, “lest.” It seemed to offer some potential for creating something interesting. What did the word mean exactly? I looked it up on dictionary.com: “for fear that.” I was inspired that a list of lests could imply a list of fears, trepidations, and dreaded outcomes. I immediately began working on my lest list. The sample dictionary sentence was: “He kept his notes by his side, lest faulty memory lead him astray.” If I couldn’t read the independent clause that comes before the comma, I would wonder what preceded the lest. I like that act of wondering. In my list, I have only supplied the clause that follows the lest. I will leave it to readers to imagine what comes before.

Timothy Dyke is a writer and teacher living in Honolulu, HI. His memoir, Backbends, was published by High Frequency Press in 2025. High Frequency Press will publish Century of Empathy, his hybrid work of autofiction, in late 2026.

Jessica Curry, Wannabe | L*STS

  

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Wannabe

Jessica Curry

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I want to be as cool as Charlotte Gainsbourg

I want to be as sexy as Sophia Loren

I want to be as profound as Emily Dickinson

I want to be as impassive as Zadie Smith

I want to be as elegant as Kristen Scott Thomas

I want to be as tiny as Sarah Jessica Parker

I want to be as radical as Mary Wollstonecraft

I want to be as loveable as Claire Danes

I want to be as funny as Maya Rudolph

I want to be as beautiful as Rachel Weisz

I want to be as sharp-witted as Nora Ephron

I want to be as heartfelt as Joni Mitchell

I want to be as impressive as Maya Angelou

I want to be as devastating as Carrie Fisher

I want to be as wise as Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I want to be as charming as Maggie Aderin-Pocock

I want to be as chic as Katherine Hepburn

I want to be as rock and roll as Miki Berenyi

I want to be as defiant as Rosa Parks

I want to be as cheeky as Lou Sanders

I want to be as influential as Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I want to be as positive as Isabelle Allende

I want to be as elliptical as Deborah Levy

I want to be as hip as Kathryn Hahn

I want to be as brave as Harriet Tubman

I want to be as iconic as Frida Kahlo

I want to be as unwavering as Eleanor Roosevelt

I want to be as blonde as Cameron Diaz

I want to be as fierce as Virginia Woolf

What is a little bit sad is that I very rarely want to be me. 

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I am a huge writer of lists, and love reading other peoples’, too. I was very depressed during the Pandemic and when I was finally starting to be able to function again I started making lists in my diary to inject some structure into my day. This list from 2022 was born from my remembering an absolutely hilarious song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where she sings about the intensity of girl crushes: “I wanna kill you and wear your skin like a dress, but then also have you see me in the dress.” Chef’s kiss. My list questions why we can feel this beautiful—bordering on obsessional—appreciation of other women, but are so rarely able to harness that love and reverence for ourselves. The title, Wannabe, is homage to the ultimate lady bosses, The Spice Girls. 

Jessica Curry is a BAFTA-winning composer, writer, game developer and broadcaster. She was co-founder of internationally acclaimed game studio The Chinese Room and her music has been performed around the world. She started writing in earnest during the pandemic as an accompaniment to her latest album, Shielding Songs. Her work draws on themes of disability, feminism, culture and the peculiarities of modern life. Her first non-fiction work, How to Deal With Everything We Lose, was published by Calque Press earlier this year. 

Misha Tenster, On Birds and Poison | L*STS

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On Birds and Poison

Misha Tentser

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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Saturday morning, Beth called to ask if I wanted to go birding at the wildlife refuge west of Syracuse. Beth was the elderly landlady of my hovel, where I drank until my vision fuzzed. I didn’t set anything on fire or host raucous parties. I sat crisscross on my bed and turned my misery inward, which demanded plastic jugs of Kentucky Deluxe from the corner liquor store. A boy-faced man named Ralph owned and operated the liquor store, the last extant business in a strip mall on the city’s West Side. 

Beth didn’t know about my drinking, which I preferred. When she called, I thought it’d be more suspicious if I declined. So she scooped me up in her Jetta booming Hall & Oates’ “Crime Pays” and zoomed the back roads to the refuge. In her car, the AC wheezed, pumping sticky August air flavored with mango freshener. I was drunk enough to imagine the wispy clouds on the horizon as smoke tendrils from God’s curly pipe. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel like a subject of the divine. 

Beth explained the cardinal birding rule, that the birds’ wellbeing came before the birder’s desire to photograph, record, or gawk. I’d never birded with rules before. Last summer, I’d spotted a crow on its side, motionless in the grass at a park across from the Erie Canal. I dribbled some water onto its beak to confirm its aliveness. The crow’s eyes moved slowly in their sockets. 

Beth parked. She and I ambled down a board walk overlooking a swamp packed with geese. We sat down on a bench. Beth pulled binoculars from her bag and searched the landscape for a juicier character like an eagle or heron. Too hot for them today, she said. What do we do? I asked. Nothing, she said, wait. 

I felt Hall’s baritone and synths bounce around my skull. I watched the geese preen and wiggle their necks. I recalled picnicking with my parents by a scummy pond, where a goose mom chased me and bit my butt cheek. I was six and unacquainted with keeping my distance. The goose bite bloomed into a royal welt, which I showed off at school in the boy’s bathroom for my friends. Every time I saw a goose since then, my butt cheek stung in recognition.

I thought my drunkenness might wane after forty minutes of sitting with Beth. Instead, it rippled into my extremities, which started to spasm. I tucked my hands into my jean pockets, but my lips pulsed. Beth stared out at the swamp. 

After three years of sobriety, I’d convinced myself I could drink casually. I started again with good bourbon, which delivered a warm burn to my esophagus. Eventually, the burn disappeared and I couldn’t afford the fancy whiskey regularly. I didn’t understand what precipitated my desire to drink again. A relapse of malaise, maybe. A desire to self-sedate? 

You ok? Beth asked. Yes… I said, it’s lush. And it was. Sun beamed through the cirrus clouds onto water lilies and shrubs, whose green extended as far as I could see. Willows drooped into the swamp, as if bowing to the water. It’s true, she said. She packed away her binoculars and we walked back to her car.

On the drive home, groves of trees shot past us on the country road. At home, I waited by the window until I saw Beth’s car pull away, then walked to the liquor store. I wanted to bask in the cool air and wine fridge lights. The fridge’s glow beamed onto my hand skin and exposed my winding nerves. The wine called to me. The whiskey did too. I stared the bottles down until they blurred and danced. 

Ralph didn’t watch me linger. He watched a horse race on his phone and twirled his mustache hairs. I considered buying some shooters and drinking in the park, beside the aqueduct where ducks gathered. But Ralph’s face, soft and oval, gleamed like my mom’s. I bought a single scratch-off. On Ralph’s t-shirt, an embroidered golden eagle head stared me down.

I wondered about flight. One spring, when I flew to Syracuse in a tiny Cessna, the pilot pointed out a skein of sandhill cranes soaring beside the plane. I was concerned the cranes would get sucked into the Cessna’s propeller, but they glided gracefully, then vanished. I didn’t know when, precisely, the birds merged with the night, or if they took a left turn towards some wetlands to rest, then nest. From my window, the cranes looked like bloodied arrows.

My apartment’s porch steps creaked under my sneakers. By the front door, I sat in the rocking chair left behind by the previous tenant. The chair’s frayed cane poked my glutes. Cars rumbled down my street and sizzling garlic scent wafted from a neighbor’s open kitchen window. Sweat gathered in the ditches of my knees. I scratched the tinny lotto film with a quarter until the symbols came into focus. I won nothing. I kept scratching until the symbols faded too. 

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This essay is about the last morning I drank booze, two and a half years ago. I don’t have a soft spot for birds or landlords, but I value the suggestion that attentiveness is an act of generosity towards self and others. My current apartment in Syracuse has gorgeous, tall windows. From my desk, I’ve seen groundhogs, cardinals, possums, and a skunk. The skunk was the size of a kid’s tricycle. I think he was benevolent.

Misha Tentser is a poet from Tucson, Arizona. His poems and essays have appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Adroit Journal, Yalobusha Review, and on North Country Public Radio. Misha's first book, American Loon, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2027. He teaches writing in Syracuse, New York. 

Erin Keane, State Fair Vanitas | L*STS

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 State Fair Vanitas

Erin Keane

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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Yes, yes, to fried everything on a stick, to the duckling slide and the poster with the ten-point plan defending the ducklings’ dignity, to the hired-out Pirate Ship and the Tilt-a-Whirl’s impeccable lettering and questionable gears; yes to a roasted ear of Frankencorn, to a pork butt sandwich dripping with grease; yes to the overfed, pampered pumpkins waiting to shock us all at weigh-in, yes to 4-H tobacco, dark stripped or burley, to quilts too beautiful to throw on the bed, to the sheep in their couture gowns, the goats lost in perverse thoughts, and the pigs, the pigs, who could say no to their downy bellies heaving in the barn-dank, straw-scattered air? And especially yes to the culinary wing on the final weekend, when the lemon tassies and meringue-topped pies and hummingbird bundt cakes with cream cheese glaze have spontaneously sprouted their own personal crops, soft green mold patches furring across slumped-in sides. Give me decay on display, blue-ribbon proud. Yes, yes, we know it’s all in vain, but yes to being here anyway, whether we take Best in Show or die trying. 

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I love the Kentucky State Fair, which I think comes through pretty clearly in this piece. There’s an overwhelming sensory assault that comes from combining a carnival, a flea market, and an agricultural competition in one space that I can’t help but respond to. I love the excessive food, of course, but also how the farm families showing livestock set up camp next to their prize animals, and how amateur gardeners, bakers, cooks, and crafters are competing just as fiercely for a ribbon and, like, a five-dollar prize. And my absolute favorite time to go to the Fair is later in the run, when the food exhibits have started to develop mold but are still on display. It’s gross in a very compelling way. I started this list knowing I wanted to end up in the culinary wing with the mold, hoping to write my way to understanding why I derive such delight from the ruined foods left out in the cases for us to admire. In the vanitas subgenre of still life paintings, human skulls and other transient objects are included to remind the viewer of the certainty of death (one of my favorite fixations) and to scold us about worldly pursuits—their idea is that in the end, all our petty little pursuits will have been in vain. This list is my answer to that: Of course we’re gonna die anyway. Of course the blue-ribbon cake is a temporary pleasure. Of course the hours of baking practice put into developing a contender for the prize can all add up to nothing in the end. But it feels good to make something intentional out of the chaos of ingredients, environment, and form, and it feels great when you surprise yourself with the result. It’s worth celebrating the choice to create instead of despairing. Nothing we do with intention and pleasure can possibly be in vain, even if we never win the big prize or leave a legacy that sustains across centuries. In a recent poetry workshop, one of my students identified a poem not labeled explicitly as an ars poetica, and I heard myself saying, maybe every poem is secretly an ars poetica, essentially making its own case for why we write in the first place. Maybe this list is one, too.  

Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poetry and the memoir RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, named one of NPR's best books of 2022. She teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Naslund-Mann MFA program at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon.com. New poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Indianapolis Review, Solid State, and Forget Cool. Her recent writing can be found at HAD, Necessary Fiction, Essay Daily, MarchXness.com, and in the anthologies HIT REPEAT UNTIL I HATE MUSIC: The March Xness Anthology (Split/Lip Press) and ONCE A CITY SAID (Sarabande Books). 

Scott F. Parker, No God but God: Notes Toward the Essay as Unknowing

Learning means learning what cannot be learned; practicing means practicing what cannot be practiced; discriminating means discriminating what cannot be discriminated. Understanding that rests in what it cannot understand is the finest. If you do not attain this goal, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.

—Zhuangzi

Here I am once again digging into the dirt of self. It is for me a life’s work.

The essay, as I read it in the Montaignian tradition, begins in ignorance: “If a subject is unfamiliar to me, for that very reason I essay it.” With this ars essayica implying its converse: If a subject is familiar, I do not.

Isn’t an essay simultaneously an expression and interrogation of the self? According to Virginia Woolf, “Almost all essays begin with a capital—‘I think’, ‘I feel’,” and achieve “permanent value” according to their authors’ courage to “write of themselves.”

There is a paradox inherent to the essay form. The genre of the self, the essay is bound by the limits of self-reference such that the articulating self is itself inarticulable. The subject (I) is the only subject unsayable, the only subject unessayable. Yet the elusiveness of the self is what draws the essayist ever forward on the page.

Like the self it discloses and fails to disclose, the essay is inherently imperfect and imperfectible, chronically incomplete. Indeed, its virtue is its imperfect peculiarity. Meet a consciousness in its pages, never Consciousness.

But those limits, broad as they may be, exhaust themselves. The essayist, constantly disclosing, constantly discloses thereby the limits of disclosure. Beyond the essay, silence looms; beyond the self, the very world.

Writing, I come to know myself better, never in full. Therefore, I go on essaying myself, perhaps, to be.

If I keep Woolf’s counsel here, I must confess that while I don’t have my autobiographical I in mind but the essayistic I that is the name of subjectivity, I nevertheless have my own unique conception of this essayistic I, one no doubt born of innate characteristics, personal history, circumstance, and whatever contingencies else.

Taking a perspective, an essay is a form of thought. Whose? I go on thinking, even without insight into the origin of thought.

Yes, the essay begins in ignorance. Doesn’t it end there, too? Essaying a subject reveals the impossibility of concluding it.

“That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche tells us. “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Only the unthought thought is worth thinking; only the unwritten essay worth writing.

We venture into the unknown a breath at a time, pursuing the essay to the ends of its conception before trailing off in silence.

Que sais-je? If pressed, as the essay presses: not a lot, very little, almost nothing.

Call it the Yessay, call it the Sayessay. We embrace what is, even at the limit of our powers of conception, even beyond.

Philosophy for the Greeks was a form of spiritual practice, a way of transforming the self through the discipline of critical reflection. Having long abdicated this purpose, philosophy sees itself reborn in the form of the essay.

The philosophers I love most are those from Plato to Wittgenstein who most resemble essayists: Berkeley and Hume, Emerson and Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Because the subject of the essay is the full expanse of the human mind, living essayistically means living at the boundaries of thought. With each discovery of new territory for thinking, simultaneously the corresponding discovery of a new thinker.

The essayist finds it possible to do philosophy in solitude, the blank page serving as the necessary other, the dialectic playing out between parts of the self. Thought thinking against itself the way Socrates thinks against his conversation partners. Partners, yes: it is a performance. The audience may be forgotten, but the audience remains.

To think out loud in the form of an essay is to perform thought as one would give a lecture consisting entirely of questions, none of them rhetorical. Who am I? What matters? How shall I live?

The questions are perennial; the answers are provisional. Each of us must write our own essays.

Montaigne: “I have no more created my book, than my book has created me.” Emerson (on Montaigne): “Cut these words and they would bleed.” But just as we write ourselves into being so too do we write ourselves out.

During pure concentration, writing becomes a form of prayer. The self, absorbed in its activity, loses itself in God.

Somehow, when I am least intelligible to myself is precisely when I experience myself as most truly who I am. What I am doing in such moments, I would have a hard time articulating, only that it is right right right as rain.

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” “No imagination can conceive of Him, nor can any understanding fathom Him.” The essayist, in his own way, converges with the wisdom traditions; his path, the path of contemplation. He discovers for himself that any thought pursued to its limit dissolves into silence as thinking exhausts itself, the object of attempted thought remaining unthought.

Does the essayist believe in God? No, the essayist doesn’t believe; the essayist essays. And God is. The rest is details, and details are where the essayist thrives, the tangibles by which he sketches the intangible, saying in relief what cannot otherwise be said, saying in silence what has no sound.

Would I be reading too much into the form if I wondered whether every essay is a devotional to God?

So often writing is discussed as a practice like other practices—yoga, meditation, running, say: in each of these, the activity brings (can bring) a particular quality of absorption that leads me beyond myself.

The only way out is through. The liberation from the self is achieved by the turn deeper into self.

Essays, David Lazar writes, “are so hopelessly, or better yet, hopefully, self-reflexive.” If thinking entails thinking about thinking and so on, n+1, before long the essayist draws a blank.

We study the self as a means of transcending it.

Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”

Torah as the interpretation of Torah, philosophy as criticism of philosophy, essay as ars essayica: in each case, the practice transforms the practitioner. The theologian, the philosopher, the essayist, each arriving at aporia finds no one arrives.

The essayist as disciple of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” He takes kenosis literally, emptying himself one thought at a time.

Neti neti leading toward the inexpressible absolute, the apophatic center around which all these words orbit.

Essaying, then, as a kind of monastic practice that can be entered into an hour at a time.

Insofar as I’m in a position to say, essaying is in my nature. Beginning in doubt, I proceed toward unknowing, and in the effort align my being with being. Through my unknowing I come to know myself as the unknower, as the unknown.

That which cannot be thought needn’t be unthought.

Until then: the thought is thought; the thought is doubted; the doubt is doubted. Eventually both thought and doubt dissolve into silence without opposite, and consciousness enters the realm of the uncontrasted, the unconceived.

What sounds like confidence is only the sound of a thought thinking itself. Essays humble me. Through them—through the process of composing them—I submit myself unfailingly to the unknown, the unknowable. (It must be a poor essayist who imagines his subject could ever fit itself to his prose.)

In pursuing thought to its end, the essayist makes of himself a being toward silence. Only beyond the limit of thought do we encounter wonder and awe, in the face of which the only thing to say, if something must be said, is, as the Muslims have it, La ilaha illa Allah.

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Scott F. Parker is the author of Teaching Without Teaching and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion, among other books. His writing has appeared in Philosophy Now, Tin House, The Believer, and other publications.