Just That 

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. 

This came a couple days ago, the fourth issue of Bridge Eight, and it’s beautiful and has a story of mine in it and it’s lovely to have a physical copy of.

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. 

How To Take A Radial Pulse

maybe this has been one of those nights that I’ll come back to later, to outline in crayon and label softly, drawing looks out from the eyes like water from a well. well,

all days have sore ribs, burnt nerves, places which go tender under threat but this one feels like something particularly loose and abused enough already, something which will just  go to heaven if it’s ever touched again.

there is something memorable about hours way too made of blood to ever bleed. 

it’s not going to hurt to put fingers on this: the dim around the pizza box around the carpet around the working anatomies around the exactly seven kidneys. 

it’s not going to hurt it’s just going to all come back in through the palm, one pressure at a time, working just like the un-music a heart makes to keep a head. 

                                   - c. essington 

              - C. Essington

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. 

- c. essington

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.

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. 

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