Darling

Feb 14, 2022

Capitol Hill, Seattle

Darling,

Do you want a love poem? I’m sending zines like Valentines and you can get one by filling out this form on my website. It might sound basic but for the past few months, I have been thinking about love! Honestly, it was exciting to realize what the strong emotions I felt could be called because I recognized them, those desires to tell a specific person something. I felt the same urges to communicate whether with a person I love or an unknown viewer or reader of an art object I create — I miss communication. The impulses feel so similar that I have even mistaken them for each other a few times (I know, embarrassing! I think about this in my book, which is on issuu). Realizing what was going on gave me an idea: I decided to lean into a particular obsession, which had reappeared exactly as it does every two years.

I started compiling a playlist, continuously adding new songs I could listen to over and over while I walked up and down Lake City Way and the Burke Gilman. The songs and movement allowed me to enter the space of playing with this project. While I felt Lake Washington to my right walking to work and sucked the cold through my nostrils, I started hiding some of the songs in social media posts as if they were secret messages because they were: I included references nobody but me would understand and hoped that someone I didn’t know would see them. I wanted to encode my desire to feel love in the posts. I also wanted to encode it into the work I’ve created under the playlist’s influence.

I’ve written six love poems and paired them each with a GREAT poem by someone else that inspired me. Then I stuck them into bottles and left them in the dark at Volunteer Park. I don’t know if anyone will read them, and I doubt the person I’m thinking of will even know they exist. But I wrote them anyway and gave them to anyone who wanted. I put them into bottles, along with a coded collage experiment made from Mark Shaw’s photographs of the Kennedys and looseleaf paper that was also intended as a secret message. I’ve been playing with this type of direct/discreet imagined communication on my art experiments Instagram, @joe_notepad.

Walking through the park at night, I couldn’t tell if someone was following me. Every time I heard motion in the shadows, a thrill rose into my throat and I realized that I enjoyed not knowing if I was being watched — it was definitely better than knowing no one was looking at all. “I don’t want my love, but you can have it,” I wanted to whisper as I threw one of the bottles into a pile of dead leaves. Instead, I kind of chuckled to myself. “I put my love in a bottle and left it as poems in Volunteer Park, although there is no chance you will find them. I don’t know you & you don’t even live here. The message stays the same but it can belong to anyone,” a part of me wanted to speak aloud. I did not. I had to catch my breath.

Reading list for this project:

“The Agony and the Ecstasy,” by Irving Stone

“The Social Photo,” by Nathan Jurgenson

“Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane,” by Paul Auster

“A New Path to the Waterfall,” by Raymond Carver

The Sonnets of Michaelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella

“The Freezer Door,” by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded,” by Dave Hickey

“Door Wide Open,” by Joyce Johnson & Jack Kerouac

“The End of the Story,” by Lydia Davis

“A Frank O’Hara Notebook,” by Bill Berkson

Movie list for this project:

“Persona” (1966)

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (2005)

“The Canyons” (2013)

“The Rules of Attraction” (2002)

“Poison” (1991)

“Kalifornia” (1993)

“Cruising” (1980)

Other things I’ve written related to this project/recently:

“How do we remember love? on ‘A Hundred Lovers’ Richie Hofmann”

“Risen” (short fiction)

“Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (short fiction)

“Padma Lakshmi Fans Are Loving This Response To Pete Davidson Rumors”

“I can’t sleep so I’ll post an open wound on the Internet” (poem)

“Books for when you can’t stop thinking about your ex”

Woof,

Joe Nasta

Joe Nasta (ze/zir) is a queer writer and mariner based in Seattle. Joe is one half of the art and poetry collective Eat Yr Manhood. Zir first book can be read for free on issuu and zir work has been published in The Rumpus, Entropy, PRISM International, Peach Mag, and others. Ze co-curates a zine of unconventional art and writing at stonepacificzine.com and is currently part of the 2022 Collective Autonomous in Practice Cohort with the Operating System/Liminal Lab.