Changed Theme And Icon. Hoping To Post More Consistently, It’s Been A Dense Year Folks. 

okay but [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith is it

I ate two kumquats and just have one final exam left so we just gotta power through, kids.

 I don’t know who the kids are, but they get it. 

On Asking Good Friend To Shave Your Head On A Sunday Night While Afraid

in going past military, past penitentiary, and past the stomach- drop of the arching pathways of a razor shifting in beautiful talented amateur hands —

in getting to a color more than a shape, in sitting the whole time, in being still in order to not get cut while being cut —

you get to your skull which, by the way, you’ve had the whole time but never had to actually meet.

you are grateful you are not a triangle but still terrified of looking too much like a globe, like an earth, like a skull, which everyone has had all along.

after, you feel sick and trace the rounded buzz like a waking bee hive or the valley of a missing tooth, fingers tonguing scalp over and over for blood or nerve or a way to call your parents and use the words “daughter” and “shaved” in the same sentence.

you do not recognize your shadow, it looks like the default human, the bald anatomy-textbook girl all too eager to show you her gallbladder and speak to you in latin about bowels and bile.

you put on lipstick to buoy these new waters, to put a pin in the sodium, to net the crabs of it and drag them to surface, those bottom-feeders.

it’s not wrong, it’s just a new way of having body you haven’t gotten around to naming just yet. you wriggle the knife of yourself, trying to re-sheath blade in this different cover.

if it doesn’t come soon, or ever, push open the cow-skin and demand a new definition of girl and sharp. bend a milked animal into the shape you need, into the kind of cradle all jagged edges need to walk down a street and keep their name clenched between cornea and pupil.

                                          - C. Essington

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. 

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. 

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 Desk Lamp as an MRI

waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.

beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.

the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.

she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.

she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

                                                 - C. Essington

The Desk Lamp as an MRI

waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.

beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.

the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.

she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.

she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

                                                 - C. Essington

some of them have hands that are on knife-hilts all the time, walking Macbeths who keep repeating marriage vows to excuse the stainless steel between their fingers; they cannot tell their wedding bands from the bands of light glinting off blades used forty one times on bread-crust and one time on something else.

                    - C. Essington 

exit music for a sister driving out of state

the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.

I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.

I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.

this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.

                  - c. essington