Writing Game

The Splinters Float

the pine-needle tea that she made before you  woke up and remembered the world flexes with green lines on its way to your lips.

the fire is low, orange, and smoking like your uncle used to.

you have brought candied orange slices cut so thin that they look like warped photographs of fruit rather than actual sugar.

you toss a rind into the fire the orange crinkles the orange and makes it go brown.

The citrus collapses in like an airless chest or a star that’s done being a star.

you take your tea up again, the tea that existed before you started the morning or believed in the sun for the seven-thousand-four-hundred-and-second time. that tea.

you woke up the same way you always have: mid-person, with human humming over your every bone, and a name that slips past your freckles and sinks, like an unskippable stone, into your rivered grey matter.

and then you had tea. and then you had tea.

                         - C. Essington 

 haven’t posted in a while but today I won the Propper prize for poetry at my college and also I got a nice coffee so

              - C. Essington

Just that 

I’m here for all LGBTQ members and let me know if you need to talk and or be directed to professional resources and also I love you; our existence is not a crime. 

Sorry for the little hiatus. I was at a cabin. I am no longer at said cabin. 

The Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.

the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.

in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear,  chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.

he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.

he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”

                                - C. Essington 

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Hi! Your writing is amazing and I always love reading it. I've been having writers block and haven't been able to write anything for a very long time. I don't write short stories or anything like that, but I do write songs and sometimes poems. Do you have any advice for writes block? Or any websites or apps that could possibly help? Thank you for your time! (:

Well thank you, and certainly, I am quite often plagued with  blocks so I’m familiar with that particular frustration. Here’s how I’ve dealt with it:

1. Read, and read broadly: watch how other writer’s approach scene, character, and plot. Don’t copy or steal, but observe and apply techniques. 

2. Engage in small experiences: eat something, go for a walk, stretch, run uphill for as long as you can. These sort of things, when really paid attention to, can get you to words. For example, if you eat a strawberry and really focus, you can often figure out something about its taste and texture that isn’t wholly obvious or stereotypical. 

3. Combine experiences: I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think you have to solely “write what you know” because this will often keep you from writing a lot of things. However, I do think you should try and have a gateway for writing an experience. Example: If you want to write about someone falling from the deck of a ship in a storm, you don’t have to have fallen yourself, but maybe do a trust-fall with someone or take a very cold shower. Theses are gates and platforms you can write from without actually having to drown to write a drowning. 

4. Get away: Stop trying to write and go somewhere far from pen and laptop. Do something you haven’t done, especially if that something involves another form of art. Museums are great.

Most of these tips are about attention. They revolve around really paying attention to where and what you are and what you’re experiencing. I love to write minutia and try to give it greater significance than its mass. In order to do this, particularly in an age where our attention is so spliced with ads and technology and ridiculous needs to never get bored, you’ve got to get away from thoughts and into feelings. Thoughts are excellent seeds for writing, but it’s very hard to think yourself into caring irrationally, which I believe is required in a lot of writing (to care about fiction,) so at some point, you’ve got to have an undiluted emotion to get ink from.

I hope this helps somewhat and I’m sorry for the length. As a side note, in the next couple of weeks I’m going to be starting a writing prompt column that I’ll be posting links to once it goes up. 

Best regards,

C. Essington. 

tiny painting for a small day/

it’s not sunday but it felt like one because

work is sloww

A poem I recently had published by Zetetic Record.