I Wake Up In My Wetsuit As The Dark Wakes Up In Its Cold— Some Things Are Like This, As Unavoidable

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 

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

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. 

Weird art time sorry. 

~I have a flash fiction piece published in Newfound Journal~

it’s here: http://newfoundjournal.org/current-issue/flash-claire-oleson/

“Ham and Starch” a short story by Claire Oleson

Slowly, with her voice pointed down towards the snow, she starts. “That we aren’t for the morning/ that we aren’t for house-fires./ That if you lit a match in your basement/ and it caught on/ and g…

I’ve had a short story published on the literary blog, The Whale.

drawing excerpt.

the sky unclenches a mouth or two —  water trips out of the night  with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.

tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the  rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark. 

the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum. 

no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone  at least seven times 

and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here  only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder. 

                                       - c. essington 

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. 

Your blog rocks babe✌

Well thank you so much for your readership, you’re very kind.