Timothy Dyke, Lest List | L*STS

  

*

Lest List

Timothy Dyke

*

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

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

*

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

*

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.