Today The Air Is Dim, Oyster-shell Dim Cut Through With Sheens Of Rain, Coming From Far Off, Nearly Off-screen,

Sweet-Talked 

This is mainly about glorifying one’s own internal circumstances so they come across as tolerable instead of possibly taxing. 

(I know this is a writing blog, I will stop posting just art sooooon, thanks for dealing with me)

This is a finished version of a piece I posted earlier. 

               - C. Essington 

I really love your piece that starts with, "I covered her neck with my left palm as I carried her up the hill." It's stunning!

Thank you! That’s very kind and much appreciated.

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!

- c. essington

Creon Tells Antigone To Keep Her Arms At Her Sides When She Runs

Before the rope stippled with green pages of lichen is tied by hands, by mind, on purpose — Before the unburied brother with his chest surrendered to the wind, heart as still as a stone sunk to river-bottom — Before the girl tore off her name, swallowed it like a sword, and cursed her sister to live a lovely life, Creon sat with the blade-eater  in the clutch of a marble chamber and talked to her in the dim slip of evening, backstage.

The chorus ran their tongues over a grooved government, lapping at stone for honey, while Antigone, with her pitch-dark hands, smoothed her  skirt into an eddy. 

Creon tells her it’s a nice knot, that she knows how to tie, she says she’s a sailor, her eyes fixed forward toward the barred wall, moonlight coming in like piano keys, she plays at the strands of string in the rope.

She says she’s a sailor, that she can always feel the water, that she feels it now, how it curves  around her brother’s aorta as a courtesy, but will soon lend it to coral polyps shaped like loveliness, as the water always does.

His hand slides over the cold bench towards her crossed legs. In her head she covers his thumb with six-feet of soil. She holds the rope tighter, tracing the strands, feels her father’s tongue somewhere between wires, then bites it between two fingernails. The hand moves back.

When you run, he says, his eyes on the music of the iron bars, When you run, after you puppet yourself on this ceiling and leave two fingers of air between your neck and the world,  do not let your elbows leak up passed your waist — it would only make your shoulders look tight, like your dad’s.

He had tight shoulders? she asks, her voice slipping under a loud question from the chorus, yes, Creon agrees with himself, tight shoulders and a mole on his clavicle, tight shoulders, among other things.

                                                    - C. Essington

I covered her neck with my left palm as I carried her up the hill. I’d been letting my hair grow and it had been growing fast, slipping my whole body back into the version of “girl” my grandparents understood. Oh, she wasn’t heavy, just cold and still. My hair grew down in tens of cowlicks, each edge gesturing out differently, looking like briar or a shoddy charcoal drawing. Underneath my palm, I could feel the pocket-knife slits of gill studding her thyroid. I knew the house, which burned and simmered in its yellow glow, was empty. I knew my hair ended around my clavicle, jutting off suddenly like scorpion tails.

Her rib cage was slight, her skin almost like a frog’s in its sheen and lichen-colored tint. I carried her up the hill and it didn’t even exhaust me. My hair got in my eyes, making it seem like I was hiking through a bramble patch. But the air was clear and the dark was building itself up like a good story. I wondered where I’d end. Her breathing seemed to come off from miles away, all of it slow and tired and as if it had touched the mountains before it bled out from her mouth. What she’d been doing, what she’d been being, I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen anything like her before, but I tend to be a calm person, so I am okay with what’s terrifying and what’s new and what’s soft to carry uphill.

Once we’re at the door, I kick the handle in and the yellow hits us like a pierced yolk pooling across ceramic. I set her on the table, her long body composing its life distantly. I get water from the tap and fill a glass and drink it while leaning on the counter. She turns once in her sleep. I think she can breathe the air. She’s been looking like she can. I suspect she’ll be up soon. I wonder what she speaks, if she speaks at all. I wonder if she’s ever killed someone. I wonder if her hair grows fast, jeweled here and there with clots of duckweed, slipping over her eyes when she works hard. I will go fill the bathtub. I will carry lilly pads up from the pond in my palms, holding their floppy lives close to my sweater. 

I will ask if she likes acrylics or the wind or staying in bed on saturdays. I’m sure we’ll be fine. I’m sure we’ll get over each other at some point. Years from now, after we’ve already divorced, I’ll see her in some cafe, her webbed toes cushioned in elongated oxfords, and we’ll do the thing where we hurt and then we nod and then I order my latte and walk out like fire. I’ve already left her, so I fill the tub and I smile at the water. It’s new and terrifying and so soft to carry uphill.

       -c. essington

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 

After The English of the House Has Gone to Sleep

candle on the wax of a boy’s face, hemorrhaging  light, palpitating the picture into morse code. his eyes comes out  on letters no one reads. 

the bloom of skin skips in and out of the night — a scratched record or a good throw embossed into a flat stone sent, alive, across some river’s softest verse. 

                                          - c. essington

agh my finger slipped and I’ve

changed my icon againsosorry

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, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete. 

              - c. essington