Ok. Good Answer. One More. How About L'engle's A Wrinkle In Time?

are you for real about the writing game? If so I'm carrying; A small browning pocket knife A compass + whistle Allergy medicine Water bottle Extra battery charge for my phone

I am for real. Thank you for your contribution and interest. 

Inventory: 1. A small browning pocket knife 2. A compass + whistle 3. Allergy medicine 4. Water bottle 5.Extra battery charge for my phone

Cleo had been painting when the first bout of thunder came up her shoulders. The tip of her brush, which was dappled with a carefully mixed hazle, spasmed across the canvas with her seizure. The cornea of her subject’s eye blurred out of his head and spilled down his coat. When the clouds stopped ricocheting through her, Cleo had gotten up and walked away from what she’d done to the acrylics. 

She stayed far away from precision after she learned that the storms had taken up a residence in her brain. Moving towards broader strokes of being, Cleo made abstractions where her seizures looked just the same as something she might have done on purpose. She carried abstractions with her and started walking through the birch woods as another form of smearing. She brought a compass but left intentions of reading it at home where the cat slept. She brought a knife to convince herself that, in a case of emergency, and even mid-seizure, the blade could convulse a mess into any sort of aggressor.

Cleo would walk and fall and shake to stillness on the forest floor, shivering like a dropped cornea. She’d call her mother after, but only after. She would get up once she was alone and unmarried from the movement, drink water, and make call on her cell phone, which she kept well-charged for accident. Sometimes, as the oceans of it leaked out of her and left their salts behind on her nerves, she’d take a dose of allergy medicine to keep the cottonwood from bothering her. 

               - C. Essington

Thank you for the opportunity, I hope it’s alright. 

If you want to play this writing game, send me a theoretical inventory of five items and I’ll try to write a person for it. 

half way done with college, home and safe in the chlorophylled center of michigan’s palm, okay.

                        - c. essington

poem excerpt on drawing excerpt.

the fire going down until its just  loose heat and fruit, the quick lisps of faces caught at its edges, those missed-stitches of expression, the looping sugars of eye-contact swimming softly, breathing glow.

it’s been a long time since I’ve posted so it makes sense to come back with this drawing.

Comment: I really love Goldfish crackers (I am currently eating some and it's making my day 184849 times better).

This very cute and happy thank you. I found free pizza tonight so I am in a similar cheese-induced state of happiness. Keep on keeping on. 

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 

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

Weird art time sorry. 

(Spontaneous Writing Exercise)

big white hair as wide as the night, open with stars, novas of tangled ends, suns streaked  over bangs until fire looks like a plaything next to her eyes, half- parted, so she can only see a pink strip of you and nothing else. the world opens on her like she’s the hinge of a pocket knife, blade-bright  heart, saw-toothing the morning. eat your soft- boiled egg and turn in your wolf for a calmer way of breathing. Molars on a yolk that makes the  plate so yellow that you don’t believe in yellow any longer.  that’s how big that hair is.

                      - C. Essington