Tiny Painting For A Small Day/

- c. essington

Is there one particular experience that you draw on in your writing?

There’s no one singular experience, no. It’s usually a mash of a lot of things and they vary a lot depending on what I’m trying to say. Like a potato, a mashed potato of feelings and thoughts. With butter. I write potatoes, end transcript. 

Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.

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

I work for this publication — it’s a really wonderful experience and the product it creates brings a set of lungs to many important voices! Please consider sending in yours. 

Submissions are open until July 18th for our third issue! We want your poetry prose and art. We want your stories. 

Short story of mine published by Spry Magazine— check it out if you have the time and interest to do so. TW for some violence. 

Excited to have a short story in the upcoming issue of Bridge Eight

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)

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

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

tiny frend drawing. sorry for the bad photo.