This Poem Is Made From Rainwater Collected Outside My Dead Uncle’s House

this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house

my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone

a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.

the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm

that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.

my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells

that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,

still bright, his hair growing like something shocking

that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks

pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire

broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—

like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank

shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair

grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles

so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories

into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence

which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.

he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house

I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong

to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.

I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,

which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.

I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,

how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead

like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.    

                        - c. essington

More Posts from Claireoleson and Others

9 years ago

I work for Meggie Royer and this is so cool that this is happening again. In all ways, it’s totally worth the time and effort I’ve put in to be able to be a little part of this beautiful/ important thing. 

Issue Two Interviews Interview with Jamie Oliveira Interview with Yena Sharma Purmasir Interview with Starchild Stela Prose Jane Burn, "Crazy
Issue 2 Of My Literary Magazine Is Now Officially Live! Thank You To My Beautiful, Empowering Staff For

Issue 2 of my literary magazine is now officially live! Thank you to my beautiful, empowering staff for making a second issue possible - we did it. Twice.

To all the abuse survivors whose work is featured in this issue, and all the survivors who will read this issue, and all the survivors in the world - you are the dreamers and the magicians, the dancers and the risen. You are not the left-behind. You are the still-here.

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your healing. <3


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9 years ago

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 

10 years ago

hello- i just wanted to say your writing has inspired me greatly- the way you string words together is truly beautiful- like a spiderweb- so delicate and whimsical yet meticulous and wondrous. I have yet to share my work with those outside my immediate family, but you inspire me to shout my words from the tops of mountains and into the clouds, even if all i ever hear back is the echo of my own voice. your work embeds deep emotions from within and reminds me that writing can affect people deeply

Hello there, thank you for your readership and kindness, I’m so glad I can move something in you. And of course, put your words where you feel comfortable, but if you do ever decide to post or publish, let me know and I’ll be happy to read anything. Also, sidenote, sounds like you might like Walt Whitman, you should check the fella out if you haven’t already.

9 years ago

Writing Game

I want to do a thing where people can send me asks of five objects someone is carrying with them, a little personal inventory, and I’ll write a little flash fiction piece developing a person around the things.

Please maybe? 

9 years ago
Sweet-Talked 

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 


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5 years ago
I Have Been Vividly Inactive,,,, But Now I Have An Important Thing I Am Very  Invested In And Excited

I have been vividly inactive,,,, but now I have an important thing I am very  invested in and excited about!

I won Newfound Org’s 2019 Prose Chapbook Prize ^^^

And Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is my debut collection of surreal short stories from this independent press and it’s out for preorder now in both ebook and print here!

https://newfound.org/product-category/print/chapbooks/prose/claire-oleson/

I’m very proud of this work and so delighted it’s found a home with a press that makes beautiful and hand-bound books.Consider taking a glance if you’ve got a moment or an interest in learning about Magritte or fish guts or Cerberus or gender thank youuuu. 

Why are the peaches in the river and how are they about divorce? Gonna have to find out.

Also consider reblogging to support an independent writer and press in one fell swoop, thanks so much!


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8 years ago
DISINHERITANCE by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine
Language is almost intuitively understood as a tool for possession—a form of communication which allow us to hold and deliver ideas between minds. However, John Sibley Williams’s latest poetry collection, Disinheritance, demonstrates how language itself is anything but concrete or possessable.

A poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver Magazine. 


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8 years ago

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. 

9 years ago

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 

9 years ago

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

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claireoleson - Claire Oleson
Claire Oleson

Queer Writer, Repd by Janklow & Nesbit, 2020 Center for Fiction Fellow, Brooklyn

202 posts

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