Item: cigar boxes, wooden English Leather bottle tops, used checkbook covers,
Model A leafsprings (2), high school graduation announcement cards (partial box),
Army helmets (purported used)

Warning: For External Use Only

Other Information: “The impulse to collect was a desire to preserve, not things or
memories, but contours, shapely flowerings”

Signals, Signs & Signets: red Mattel Mustang, my grandfather’s Mason ring, my
wife’s great grandfather’s cufflinks, “McGovern and Eagleton in ’72!” (patriotic
button),  “Million Dollar Infield” baseball (’76 Phillies)

Vessel: Kaiser Wilhelm piggybank, the cupboards of Edgewood Rd, moving boxes
(apple), Russian nesting dolls, ossified kelp bulb (NorCal momento mori) 

Inactive Ingredients: nostalgia

Intention: to return the thing to Thing, to fix an acquisition, to glue a loss

Item: “Barns of America” (placemats), macrame God’s Eye (3), flattened bottle cap
collection (suspected train), Penthouse Forum (summer of ’78), wooden knife
collection (self-carved)

Foreign Land: Wisconsin, Xanadu, Sri Lanka, divorce

DJ: Yo Yo Tenenbaum, I-Hop Shabazz, Silver Dolla n’ Maple Stack

Limit: object permanence, social construction, identity politics, generation marker,
or “at the Greyhound station it was clear I did not have enough for a locker”

Wash: curtains, child, mouth, sky

Futility: no stopping atoms, no drying tears, no fixed century, no fixed family

matthew cooperman