So I’ve Been Scrounging Through This Old Room In Our House We Just Label The “antique Room” And

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

tiny painting for a small day/

it’s not sunday but it felt like one because

work is sloww

- c. essington

in a bite of lamplight, he stands up to say I love you. he says it slow so he can feel it in his mouth, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete. 

              - c. essington

Excited to have a short story in the upcoming issue of Bridge Eight

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

Engine Flooding

You can see the cellphone, flushed teal underneath at least three feet of water, shiver when the pond’s surface gets frayed by the wind. You are on your hands and knees.

Just had a short fiction piece published by Maudlin House! Please consider taking a look if you have the interest and a speck of time to do so. 

I’d also love to hear what anyone thinks about it, any comments/ critiques would be immensely appreciated. 

http://maudlinhouse.net/engine-flooding/

Short story of mine published by Spry Magazine— check it out if you have the time and interest to do so. TW for some violence. 

Practicing Herpetology From The Corner Table

flick a glance towards a lit sample of stranger. it’s a quick, hinged exercise, an in-and-out of knife — something woven from the same speed as a snake-tongue that jousts the air with one rattle of investigation at its end just before all sense is yanked back between the eyes’ own teeth.

revisiting is dangerous and dwelling is a form of coiling: a suffocation from across the room where you re-wrap your staring around bones and bones of detail, crushing.

spend too long and you will leave drips of yourself behind, a scale of iris-color, a clear stretch of skin that will give away the bridge of your nose, the rise of your cheeks, the fall of a mouth — how it cradles the air.

the looking ought to work like the click of a microscope slide hitching into the mandibles of sight: here is your speck of clarity, your second-long bite of flagellum and pond water.

memorize the chin, the glasses, the hands, burrowed with the ceramic-blue of veins, the shoreline of hair starting, the half-moons of eyebrows, the lips that twitch with the rims of words, the slide of ears that work to drink the sound, the pupils cast (thankfully) down towards some dim elsewhere. write it down on a fold of brain, nowhere else, and get back to your own heartbeat.

                        - C. Essington 

from here, the metal of the sink trips the bright of the afternoon into one blot of silver  just thick enough  to get dim on.

from here, sleep is below us like a manta ray is below the water. we feel wings, slick and cousined to a shark, slip across our eyes. we fall in and out of ourselves, hands very close to not touching. 

from here, I’ve caught the picture of your eyes closed across the pillow, brain still shadowed, leg twitching  on the rim of a dream. I woke up before you to find the world soft, to find a privacy, the bed dented lightly with the girl of it. 

        - c. essington