You Are Amazing. So Talented At Such A Young Age.

- 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

kayaking in the winter           means you’re confident or lonely

running uphill until everything, including your name, hurts          means that there is something in your body which          you’ve missed missing.

writing codes in plain english out of words that          symbolize nothing but themselves          means you’ve taken up poetry again          and should stop or get a kayak by this time, next december.

- c. essington

Writing Workshop Launch!

We’re excited to announce that Siblíní is hosting a Summer Writing Workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the month of July!

We’re currently accepting applications from high school and college-age students who are interested in learning more about creative writing and publication opportunities. For more information and to apply, please visit our website. 

http://www.siblinijournal.com/#!writing-workshop/o95nw

If able, any reblogging of this opportunity would be immensely appreciated!

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT by Melody S. Gee Cooper Dillon, 55 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson - Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives.

This is a review I wrote of Melody Gee's poetry collection "The Dead in Daylight" which is now up on Cleaver magazine's blog.

- c. essington

                        - c. essington

poem excerpt on drawing excerpt.

I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.

I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.

the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.

I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.

it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.

I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.

the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.

the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.

I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.

and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.

                   - c.essington

Hi! Back! Moving over from Twitter. Here’s a recent short story; more to come.

This is about wishing you could eat paint and other things you shouldn’t want.

The Oxonian Review

Colours for a Night

‘You will not get drunk on the long-sober traces of wine that exist inside her skin, you won’t. It is very easy not to ingest these images.

tiny frend drawing. sorry for the bad photo.