- C. Essington

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Fire Place

outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.

the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.

our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.

we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.

the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.

                           - C. Essington 

Writing game: How about a phone number scribbled on a bit of paper, two dollars in change, a pen, a receipt for a restaurant, and a pack of cigarettes?

Sure thing, thank you. 

Inventory:1. A phone number scribbled on bit of paper2. Two dollars in change3. A pen4. A receipt for a restaurant 5. A pack of cigarettes

There is a piece of paper in my pocket, folded twice over, like pigeon’s wings, or my tongue in a fight, or how I sleep when I’m sad. It’s white with black print and it says that I should be full by now. There’s also receipt from my dinner. After eating through six truffle mushrooms curled in oil and laid over pasta, I left with some coins in my pocket and not much else, my mouth ringing with salt and linguini and fungi I can’t afford but swallowed anyway. 

I’m not full yet despite the seven digits that sit like a brand by my left thigh, so I take out ink and cross them into black hashes. There is being bloated and there is being starving and I’d rather fit in one of those places than be left alone in the middle, a stranger’s affection listed to me in numbers. 

I light something and watch it dwindle, a white column of paper singing in orange and going grey. I think that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing too. It’s not great, I’m still hungry and aching and made of willow leaves and molars, but I can stand upright in my name and store my grievances on the dark sides of my quarters and breathe like I love it, but don’t really have a reason for it all the time.  

           - C. Essington

Thank you for this and your support,

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

but what if it were

nice/ honeyed/ came with its own heart/ already done up in light blue muslin and set to music, wait, the right music.

and what if it 

didn’t hurt (too much)/ came soft in places like the sky comes whole/ and looked like cream and felt like it too and worked like it too. 

and what if

a pulse doesn’t have to feel like a punchline that keeps getting told without a joke to explain it/ (get it, get it, get it)/ and a life doesn’t have to feel like a pressure/ and your head doesn’t always have to be the thing that starts you and ends you and is you. 

                                         - c. essington 

drawing excerpt.

A poem I recently had published by Zetetic Record.

Weird art time sorry. 

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Joan of Arc’s Area Code

I have kept the fire on hold for eight months now- the dial tone is burning my left ear into decibels of charcoal.

I have re-recorded my answering message to say that I am out of town (and also newly made of ash and second-story window exits.)

I have slept next to the receiver, receiving, as the blips of flame came at me like candle light.

I know that, on the other side of the spiraling teal cord, there is an orange and a yellow and a red all gnawing through the same heated throat, all of its light just waiting to get to the talking.

But I do not want to start with the hellos or the incinerations; I would like to skip the going down and get right to the coming up for air- as though this were water, as though all the ocean’s burning salts were synonymous to a lit stove.

I want the after photo — the stale, post-noise sound of nothing happening. That saw-tooth quiet coming in like a wave.

I want the lost-conversation hum of the house being suddenly empty and the me being suddenly not on fire —

the phone cradled in a soft, home-dialed, plastic-blue.

                             - C. Essingotn

one gallon of wind skims over us, drying sharply in our nerves like  some font set too large for us to read— I think I can make out the four-way stop of a “t”  unfolding its cold phoneme across my chest. 

                                      - c. essington