In A Bite Of Lamplight, He Stands Up To Say I Love You. He Says It Slow So He Can Feel It In His Mouth,

my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.

the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.

                                   - C. Essington

what food would go with the necronomicon?

Uh a single saltine on grey plate that you swear you ate but keeps popping up again, always tasting like it has a little more salt each time. 

werkloos spring 2016

werkloos mag's second issue, "in limbo"

I’ve got a piece published in the second issue of werkloos, an online journal. It’s a flash fiction piece starting on page 17 called “Red Velvets”. Give it a look if you have a moment and a speck of interest, thanks! 

PS I adore hearing what people think, so feedback is uber welcome. 

(https://issuu.com/werkloosmag/docs/werkloos_spring_2016?e=22031949/36085278)

Keep posting your art! I love your writing, but the art is definitely a nice touch and I really enjoy seeing it :)

Well thank you so much, I was hoping it wasn’t annoying. 

color palettes

               - c. essington 

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

Memoirs Don’t Need Dedications

when Ahmed stopped being able to press on the morning, to work the light  into a way of seeing so he could do something drastic, like make it down the hallway, he took a moment  to donate his whole body back to himself.

he wrenched marrow and incisors and the corners of his dog-eared heartbeats (which he had been saving  to give to someone else) out of the intention of saving, and he put them back in his own chest and let them howl there.

when he realized that all this felt like stealing, he understood how far from his own lungs he must have been breathing.

                                  - C. Essington 

I love your writings. You are truly a talented poet and I love seeing your work on my dashboard. Congratulations on the publication in werkloos xx (take care)

Hey thank you, this is so sweet and lovely, just like you. 

werkloos spring 2016

werkloos mag's second issue, "in limbo"

I’ve got a piece published in the second issue of werkloos, an online journal. It’s a flash fiction piece starting on page 17 called “Red Velvets”. Give it a look if you have a moment and a speck of interest, thanks! 

PS I adore hearing what people think, so feedback is uber welcome. 

(https://issuu.com/werkloosmag/docs/werkloos_spring_2016?e=22031949/36085278)

A tiny piece up on Moonsick Magazine