Andromeda In A Skillet

              - C. Essington

For the game: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Food: Zucchini bread someone you care about made but burned a little

Location: An empty lighthouse on a cliffside that’s starting to lean out over the tide. 

Thank you. 

Send me a book title in an ask and I’ll reply with a food and a place I think fit with the piece. 

sleeping on it

everything about it goes around like a good story which takes a new room on a new tongue every night. I wish I could do the same but I’m not so good at convincing people to give me their time or their teeth or their mornings. 

the idea is that you drop yourself and then recover on waking to find that it all hangs different on the shoulders, is less pink, more amaranth, less the leaves of a turnip flower, more the hollowed chest of a cloud after rain—

go to bed across it, maybe its sheets will muddle into a word, maybe the goose feathers will conspire into a cotton-mouthed dictation, saying ah yes, the breakthrough, the meaning, the good. 

or maybe it’s just the time and how it drags through the dark like the cold body of a fish dragging through a mile of river: just about breathing without meaning to and surviving without intending survival until the thing that almost ate you the night before has starved to death, lost its ribs, its music its importance. or it could be

that you forget after you go under and come up, that if it hurts, it will have a place where it  can stop hurting, and a REM cycle is just a good way to buck the hours  off your nerves, not that it’s particularly curative,  just that it knows how to drown minutes

out of their bodies and yours.

         - c. essington

What are some of your favorite things about Kenyon?

- Class sizes: the largest class I’ve been in, as a freshman, was about 25 students. This is seriously such a big deal for me, it makes the class relations much easier and peer conversation much more possible. The professors know your name, recognize your participation, and are much more likely to empathize if you have a sick day/ need to take a mental health day.

- The people: Everyone is interesting in one way or another. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people and gotten to know several of them in a fairly significant way. It’s a small school so running in to people you know is not hard to do. This is a bit of a personal preference, but I’d rather really know five people than know the names of fifty.

- Professors: So far I’ve had no TAs teaching courses and all my professors have held office hours that are accessible to me and or have been willing to schedule time outside of them to meet. The professors I’ve had are invested and interesting and encourage students to come to their hours just to discuss the subject they’re teaching. I had a friend go in to speak to a professor about multiple-worlds theory in literature just for kicks and he responded by giving her more resources and ideas. 

I hope that helps! All of this is of course purely based on my experiences so far and certainly does not reflect everyone’s opinion of the institution. But I love it!

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

- c. essington

DISINHERITANCE by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Language is almost intuitively understood as a tool for possession—a form of communication which allow us to hold and deliver ideas between minds. However, John Sibley Williams’s latest poetry collection, Disinheritance, demonstrates how language itself is anything but concrete or possessable.

A poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver Magazine. 

- c. essington

tiny frend drawing. sorry for the bad photo. 

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

some of them have hands that are on knife-hilts all the time, walking Macbeths who keep repeating marriage vows to excuse the stainless steel between their fingers; they cannot tell their wedding bands from the bands of light glinting off blades used forty one times on bread-crust and one time on something else.

                    - C. Essington