Angie Lee, List of Non Lasts & Last to Loss | L*STS

       

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List of Non Lasts and Last to Loss

Angie Lee

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

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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List of Non Lasts 

Well then, that’s the last of it.

Guess what else it isn’t?

If it’s the one thing I do, it won’t be the only thing.

Let’s make it!

A roll of toilet paper that appears half gone has really only 38% left.

Nothing wrong with your vision.

Laugh

at the detail of batteries, call it a hole, not a chance, or even a saloon with supper and an exit or encore or inning, walk with a white rhino or dodo for days, on one’s legs, gum trees, or gasp at straws or the temptation of an onramp. Hurrah! Here come the rites, no big, big thing, goodbye theorems, hurdles and famous words, or a not so famous word, drop in for symphony season while it’s still fun, fashion a meal from a rotten egg and measure a planet on her period, ditch the resort to stand at the frontier, do take a seat between wills and pairs of socks worn at the dance where good guys finish.

Do not forget when to add the butter.

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Last to Loss

Läst is the foot-shaped form or mold that a shoe is built around

Läst is to have been read

Läst is a rut, furrow, track, a path pressed into the earth

Läst is a footprint or to follow 

Läst is a burden, cargo, weight

So by extension to mold anything is to läst, and the process of lästing is using a tool to recreate possibly multiples, possibly mutations and possibly more.

A lover can be läst, in the sense of being read, and not läst if this lover is not read well. The läst (footprint) of love can also be the läst (burden, load) and following love’s läst (track) can form a läst (furrow), into which can be cast a lossless läst (form) of sadness—the indentation or mold set to receive multiple molten drizzles, perhaps no different than previous loves.

It’s the last minute in a construct of many on this most recent occasion, time is a sequence and like last time when we curve back in on ourselves in a last—a track, on this oval velodrome track we are last but we are sneaky and if we for sure are slow enough we will eventually be first.

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I am a lister in all senses of the word, and mistakenly took the L*STS project to be only about lists, but after staring at the “*” for some time, I started thinking about lasts, the tool or foot-shaped mold that cobblers use to form a shoe. The word for the tool is derived from Scandinavian languages, läst (in Swedish) and læst (in Danish and Norwegian), and my dear Swedish friend told me that “Läst is Swedish for the tool and to have read a book.”

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This led me to thinking about footprints and indexes in both the book sense and in mold making: forming impressions, casting objects, what is the shape of absence, and what is implied.

Add to that some obscure and old definitions of läst, and my true desire to make a list: of lasts, even if it means leaving the bits of last out.

Angie Lee is an artist/writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been published in DIAGRAM, Witness, The Cleaver Quarterly, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide, forthcoming in 2026 from Mountaineers Books. Her chapbook, 12, was a 2023 winner of Tilted House’s Netsuke micro book/object contest.