She’s Small And Made Of Sodium

but what if it were

nice/ honeyed/ came with its own heart/ already done up in light blue muslin and set to music, wait, the right music.

and what if it 

didn’t hurt (too much)/ came soft in places like the sky comes whole/ and looked like cream and felt like it too and worked like it too. 

and what if

a pulse doesn’t have to feel like a punchline that keeps getting told without a joke to explain it/ (get it, get it, get it)/ and a life doesn’t have to feel like a pressure/ and your head doesn’t always have to be the thing that starts you and ends you and is you. 

                                         - c. essington 

Heading back to my college to spend the summer working for the Kenyon Review!

Dried Dates

sitting purple and unkissed on the crests of our lips. is your fish all right tonight or have they drowned it too deep into the cream?

the whole of the night lays soft and creased with sun, like it wasn’t held in the wine we drank but dragged out on the rocks by the shoreline. it feels distant and violet, like a cold bruise or a hickey that you gave to yourself which you can see in the bathroom mirror from the far end of your bedroom. your bedroom, which we keep closed.

even though it’s right here, rounded over tines and tablecloth and third rounds of water. the water which comes on the tongue like it’s been salted by air and muddied with the brine from the bottoms of our shoes that stood on the stoop for so so long.

there is sodium in the lamplight, there is anointing oil shining just behind your irises but you won’t spend it tonight, because we’ve got nothing but dimmest and most practical sugars to bless. besides, the dinner was nice and cost you.

it is not good but it has been soft, the night, the date, I could take it on a hike and know it would not spoil from hours in the heat and sweat of going uphill. we rove around the pit, don’t kiss, and shuck the waxy hide of it on the corners of our “goodnights”

for the sake of health, some people substitute this sort of thing for its betters and broaders and deepers. for the sake of health, you can pit one date and eviscerate it, out of its stretched-globe shape, so it sits only in name and color.

from here, it is pureed with hot water until the mastication of blades yields a warm paste not wholly unlike the first date you had before. this is what you do instead of lofting one white hill of sugar from bag to cup to cake.

this is what you do when you walk away into the damp summer night, ragged with the sharp cuts of car lights, tossed against the plastic edges of being polite for hours.

you take your drenched self home, the whole of you lukewarm and cast into a tepid magenta. 

                                               - C. Essington

color palettes

               - c. essington 

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

I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.

I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.

the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.

I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.

it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.

I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.

the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.

the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.

I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.

and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.

                   - c.essington

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? 

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 

it’s been a long time since I’ve posted so it makes sense to come back with this drawing.

You mentioned Richard Siken in an earlier ask - how do you find new contemporary poets to read?

Largely by asking other readers and or writers who they like. Also by engaging with people who are also emerging writers. Artists supporting artists is great and super underrated. 

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