Exit Music For A Sister Driving Out Of State

took a neuro exam, early-voted, found out I’m getting a publication that’s going to pay me for poems, and painted todayp

What's your favorite place in the world? Where would you most like to travel to?

I don’t think I have a particularly favorite place just yet. I’d really love to go to Ireland or Scotland. I went to London once to visit my uncle, and I have to say that was very beautiful. 

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

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 

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 

- c. essington

Questions? You should send in questions, I have five hours of being alone in a house, I can’t do homework the entire time without breaks. Send questionnnsssss.

(Especially about college, Kenyon, writing, publishing, books etc.) 

Andromeda in a Skillet

it is early, there’s an egg in the oil-slicked frying pan, frying.

you are somewhere tossing off sleep, rolling over, taking the morning like a prescription

the stairs will wait for you to come down, hunger lining your sock-armored heels.

the night played a game of purple with your eyes and drew violet moons above your cheeks, gibbous.

my love sizzles on the stove-top over butter; it has 92 calories today.

we aren’t really going anywhere, we flex open in the kitchen, stretching our humanities in a honeyed 6 AM

fast is how the egg gets taken, going from shelled to food to some piece of the personhood you’ll call yourself if you had the time.

but we’re still here after the dancing and walking and staining and bills and words and teeth of it, living.

it’s you, the stairs, the night in blood below your eyelids, an egg, the sink. that’s it.

that’s the world.

                                    - C. Essington 

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 

color palettes

               - c. essington