The Fire Going Down Until Its Just  Loose Heat And Fruit, The Quick Lisps Of Faces Caught At Its Edges,

Practicing Herpetology From The Corner Table

flick a glance towards a lit sample of stranger. it’s a quick, hinged exercise, an in-and-out of knife — something woven from the same speed as a snake-tongue that jousts the air with one rattle of investigation at its end just before all sense is yanked back between the eyes’ own teeth.

revisiting is dangerous and dwelling is a form of coiling: a suffocation from across the room where you re-wrap your staring around bones and bones of detail, crushing.

spend too long and you will leave drips of yourself behind, a scale of iris-color, a clear stretch of skin that will give away the bridge of your nose, the rise of your cheeks, the fall of a mouth — how it cradles the air.

the looking ought to work like the click of a microscope slide hitching into the mandibles of sight: here is your speck of clarity, your second-long bite of flagellum and pond water.

memorize the chin, the glasses, the hands, burrowed with the ceramic-blue of veins, the shoreline of hair starting, the half-moons of eyebrows, the lips that twitch with the rims of words, the slide of ears that work to drink the sound, the pupils cast (thankfully) down towards some dim elsewhere. write it down on a fold of brain, nowhere else, and get back to your own heartbeat.

                        - C. Essington 

                        - c. essington

poem excerpt on drawing excerpt.

Ten Places You Must Visit After You’ve Died

the fence which circles your backyard like a wedding band squeezes tight around the fingers of overgrown grass— no one’s home but the house still spills with voices, somehow. now, if you look out of your left-hand window, you’ll see we’re passing the sahara.

you ought to hire your own sherpa, trusting a company will never do, the crest of everest resembles the corners of your mother’s eyes too much for you to see. you say no thank you and start on down alone.

in a flurry of mortality, you buy a ticket for a cruise trip which happens on a boat just big enough to make you feel like you’re never on a boat— a floating nowhere suspended above the saltwater. the only people crying are children, which is a good sign, it means that things are going largely well and the only things going wrong are happening to lost toys and the bright braids of small girls. it might be good here. you heave last night’s crab over the port side, yes, it’s all good here.

                           - c. essington

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Here’s a poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver magazine. 

Hi lovely, again, I am in awe of your beautiful words. I had a question though, if you don't mind. Do you have any tips for someone who is working on pursuing their writing more regularly? I used to write, but have gotten out of practice and am looking for anything to help me start again. Thank you!

Of course, thanks for all of your support. Tumblr's been helpful to me, I try to put up at least one thing a day, even if it's gross and not a thing. 

Calendars can aid one's efforts if you have a word count goal in mind. But if you're looking less for clerical things and more for inspiration, the best tip I have is to notice things, really notice things. And always have notebook to pin interesting tidbits to the page, this lets you have spare ingredients for stewing something together later. It's like a form of collecting. Also spy on people, not aggressively, but try to see them in a real way. 

When you eat, try to know how and why you're doing it and what's going over your tongue. When you sleep, pay attention to how you slip from yourself. You do not need to have fallen from a boat in a storm to write well about someone falling from a boat in a storm. If you've eaten a lime and fallen asleep I think you can manage to write it pretty well for a general audience. Don't be afraid to cross things over into areas where they seemingly don't belong, and try not to be afraid to look odd in words.

Ah, sorry, a touch long if you were looking for a one-liner. I am not Hemingway-esc, I spend a long time on little things. 

Prof: You have to write this essay about more than one text, bring the works in discussion with one another.

Me, setting up three books across from one another at a mini dinner table: I got it I got it shhh...

Me, after pouring them all glasses of wine and setting out a nice cheese selection: Talk to each other, guys.

Downstream

five fingers stop for the night on a collarbone — pausing like rainwater, the tips pool, and, as round as worlds, they rest like dewdrops. just like dew drops.

dappling over the calcium, the five lucid puddles piano at my skin. the music tunnels inward, bodiless with silence, ghosting sixteenth notes into my synapses.

the weight is liquid, the pressing seeps, I look down through each separate clot of skin and river and see a crush of orange leaves sinking into my chest.

I circle the wrist and uproot its pouring. the feeling prickles off me the same way a boiling pot loses teeth when tugged off the stove.

                               - C. Essington

Fire Place

outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.

the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.

our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.

we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.

the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.

                           - 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.

Writing Workshop Launch!

We’re excited to announce that Siblíní is hosting a Summer Writing Workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the month of July!

We’re currently accepting applications from high school and college-age students who are interested in learning more about creative writing and publication opportunities. For more information and to apply, please visit our website. 

http://www.siblinijournal.com/#!writing-workshop/o95nw

If able, any reblogging of this opportunity would be immensely appreciated!