Keepsake

Sinag Fernandez, in response to Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth by Sav Mattyasovszky and Bella den Boogert.

ㅤ
ㅤ
Dear readers, beautiful, admired,

I shoot a letter in a postbox. I never know where it will end up.

In my closet, I keep a large box of memorabilia—boarding passes, movie tickets, teen year diaries, handmade gifts from old friends, pressed flowers from former lovers.

Will you receive this proof of my body, my wanting, our memory?

Our world is increasingly mediated and abstracted, everything allusive and elusive — nostalgic myths of contact and presence.¹ To find my body, revel in these objects instead.

I keep my own keepsakes:
Pandora charms over
my wrist, each fictive
domain a vessel of my wanting.

My treasure trove is collecting dust. Ink smudging on confessions and apologies. Polaroids fading. Containers encasing intent, clusters of promises.² Image replacing memory. Object substituting body. Midas aftertouch. Skin in crate like the sun ㅤㅤtravelling to you.

You, like Pandora, all-gifted, made of clay and water.
I gift you part antithesis: silicone, rust,
metal, strange permanence. My wanting
is a crown, a chain.

There are two poles to this: the lover, the beloved. In between: a lack. I want what I do not have. In this presence of absence, desire comes alive. ³ “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”⁴

A method: Aimpoint.⁵
I feel the slope of the ground
beneath my feet to determine
the gravity
between
youㅤㅤㅤㅤ
and

me.ㅤ

Letters are witnesses, judges, conduits. Scribbles of language contour a space of imagination, a sky of possibility; folded, secret, potential gasoline. “And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.”⁶

Shoot this right through the center of the ring. Shoot this in a hole. Score.

Will you, overcome
by curiosity, unlock
your box, access
my desire?

from,
Your secret admirer

  1. Susan Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” On Longing (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 133.
  2. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2006): 20.
  3. Anne Carson, “Finding the Edge,” Eros the Bittersweet (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987) 30.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Zephyr Melton, “The Basics of AimPoint Green Reading, Explained in 30 Seconds,” Golf, October 2, 2020, https://golf.com/instruction/putting/aimpoint-green-reading-basics-30-seconds/
  6. Anne Carson, “Realist,” Eros the Bittersweet (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987) 110.