On Asking Good Friend To Shave Your Head On A Sunday Night While Afraid

Your blog rocks babe✌

Well thank you so much for your readership, you’re very kind. 

Your writing is gorgeous. I don't understand, and I do, and it doesn't matter because your lines make me ache. Thanks for spilling.

ahhhhh thank you so much. That’s what I do it for largely, the validation and transmitting of emotion from one body to others. Writing belongs to interpretation, and I may have made it, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to its readers’ thoughts and reactions. I just put my name at the bottom so people can know where it came from. 

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

I am in love with your writing x

AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way. 

The Desk Lamp as an MRI

waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.

beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.

the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.

she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.

she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

                                                 - C. Essington

Ten Places You Must Visit After You’ve Died

the fence which circles your backyard like a wedding band squeezes tight around the fingers of overgrown grass— no one’s home but the house still spills with voices, somehow. now, if you look out of your left-hand window, you’ll see we’re passing the sahara.

you ought to hire your own sherpa, trusting a company will never do, the crest of everest resembles the corners of your mother’s eyes too much for you to see. you say no thank you and start on down alone.

in a flurry of mortality, you buy a ticket for a cruise trip which happens on a boat just big enough to make you feel like you’re never on a boat— a floating nowhere suspended above the saltwater. the only people crying are children, which is a good sign, it means that things are going largely well and the only things going wrong are happening to lost toys and the bright braids of small girls. it might be good here. you heave last night’s crab over the port side, yes, it’s all good here.

                           - c. essington

You mentioned Richard Siken in an earlier ask - how do you find new contemporary poets to read?

Largely by asking other readers and or writers who they like. Also by engaging with people who are also emerging writers. Artists supporting artists is great and super underrated. 

Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.

exit music for a sister driving out of state

the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.

I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.

I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.

this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.

                  - c. essington

this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house

my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone

a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.

the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm

that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.

my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells

that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,

still bright, his hair growing like something shocking

that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks

pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire

broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—

like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank

shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair

grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles

so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories

into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence

which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.

he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house

I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong

to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.

I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,

which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.

I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,

how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead

like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.    

                        - c. essington

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