Hi! Back! Moving Over From Twitter. Here’s A Recent Short Story; More To Come.

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

kayaking in the winter           means you’re confident or lonely

running uphill until everything, including your name, hurts          means that there is something in your body which          you’ve missed missing.

writing codes in plain english out of words that          symbolize nothing but themselves          means you’ve taken up poetry again          and should stop or get a kayak by this time, next december.

- c. essington

I am in love with your writing x

AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way. 

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

Throwback weird art time to add some picture to the page. 

Weird art time? Weird art time.

- C. Essington

Your writing is gorgeous. I don't understand, and I do, and it doesn't matter because your lines make me ache. Thanks for spilling.

ahhhhh thank you so much. That’s what I do it for largely, the validation and transmitting of emotion from one body to others. Writing belongs to interpretation, and I may have made it, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to its readers’ thoughts and reactions. I just put my name at the bottom so people can know where it came from. 

Memoirs Don’t Need Dedications

when Ahmed stopped being able to press on the morning, to work the light  into a way of seeing so he could do something drastic, like make it down the hallway, he took a moment  to donate his whole body back to himself.

he wrenched marrow and incisors and the corners of his dog-eared heartbeats (which he had been saving  to give to someone else) out of the intention of saving, and he put them back in his own chest and let them howl there.

when he realized that all this felt like stealing, he understood how far from his own lungs he must have been breathing.

                                  - 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

How To Take A Radial Pulse

maybe this has been one of those nights that I’ll come back to later, to outline in crayon and label softly, drawing looks out from the eyes like water from a well. well,

all days have sore ribs, burnt nerves, places which go tender under threat but this one feels like something particularly loose and abused enough already, something which will just  go to heaven if it’s ever touched again.

there is something memorable about hours way too made of blood to ever bleed. 

it’s not going to hurt to put fingers on this: the dim around the pizza box around the carpet around the working anatomies around the exactly seven kidneys. 

it’s not going to hurt it’s just going to all come back in through the palm, one pressure at a time, working just like the un-music a heart makes to keep a head. 

                                   - c. essington 

color palettes

               - c. essington