The Desk Lamp As An MRI

I work here — it’s been such a rewarding and interesting experience so consider it if you’re interested in publication/ human rights/ language. 

Hi friends! If you’re interested in working for my literary magazine Persephone’s Daughters (dedicated to empowering female abuse survivors), you’re in luck! We’re open for new staff member applications (due on May 10th).

Just fill out the form/application above and you’re good to go!

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

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Here’s a poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver magazine. 

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 

I will have a flash fiction piece published in this coming issue of werkloos! 

we’re very excited to announce the launch date of our second issue, in limbo. keep your eyes peeled & your hearts steady, things are about to get lit.

cover image by the talented @ernestvolynec

- c. essington

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

in going past military, past penitentiary, and past the stomach- drop of the arching pathways of a razor shifting in beautiful talented amateur hands —

in getting to a color more than a shape, in sitting the whole time, in being still in order to not get cut while being cut —

you get to your skull which, by the way, you’ve had the whole time but never had to actually meet.

you are grateful you are not a triangle but still terrified of looking too much like a globe, like an earth, like a skull, which everyone has had all along.

after, you feel sick and trace the rounded buzz like a waking bee hive or the valley of a missing tooth, fingers tonguing scalp over and over for blood or nerve or a way to call your parents and use the words “daughter” and “shaved” in the same sentence.

you do not recognize your shadow, it looks like the default human, the bald anatomy-textbook girl all too eager to show you her gallbladder and speak to you in latin about bowels and bile.

you put on lipstick to buoy these new waters, to put a pin in the sodium, to net the crabs of it and drag them to surface, those bottom-feeders.

it’s not wrong, it’s just a new way of having body you haven’t gotten around to naming just yet. you wriggle the knife of yourself, trying to re-sheath blade in this different cover.

if it doesn’t come soon, or ever, push open the cow-skin and demand a new definition of girl and sharp. bend a milked animal into the shape you need, into the kind of cradle all jagged edges need to walk down a street and keep their name clenched between cornea and pupil.

                                          - C. Essington

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.

So I’ve been scrounging through this old room in our house we just label the “antique room” and I usually leave it alone. But today I found these old photos from 1928 of my great grandfather Axel on a fishing trip “out west”. 

I wrote some tiny casual poetry and can only hope that Axel, in all of your current nonexistence, you can find it in that twisted shadowed grin to forgive my lingual ramblings.