Here's Another Photo From My Great Grandfather Axel's Fishing Trip Out West In 1928. I'll Probably Put

I love your writings. You are truly a talented poet and I love seeing your work on my dashboard. Congratulations on the publication in werkloos xx (take care)

Hey thank you, this is so sweet and lovely, just like you. 

Engine Flooding

You can see the cellphone, flushed teal underneath at least three feet of water, shiver when the pond’s surface gets frayed by the wind. You are on your hands and knees.

Just had a short fiction piece published by Maudlin House! Please consider taking a look if you have the interest and a speck of time to do so. 

I’d also love to hear what anyone thinks about it, any comments/ critiques would be immensely appreciated. 

http://maudlinhouse.net/engine-flooding/

I will have a flash fiction piece published in this coming issue of werkloos! 

we’re very excited to announce the launch date of our second issue, in limbo. keep your eyes peeled & your hearts steady, things are about to get lit.

cover image by the talented @ernestvolynec

On Asking Good Friend To Shave Your Head On A Sunday Night While Afraid

in going past military, past penitentiary, and past the stomach- drop of the arching pathways of a razor shifting in beautiful talented amateur hands —

in getting to a color more than a shape, in sitting the whole time, in being still in order to not get cut while being cut —

you get to your skull which, by the way, you’ve had the whole time but never had to actually meet.

you are grateful you are not a triangle but still terrified of looking too much like a globe, like an earth, like a skull, which everyone has had all along.

after, you feel sick and trace the rounded buzz like a waking bee hive or the valley of a missing tooth, fingers tonguing scalp over and over for blood or nerve or a way to call your parents and use the words “daughter” and “shaved” in the same sentence.

you do not recognize your shadow, it looks like the default human, the bald anatomy-textbook girl all too eager to show you her gallbladder and speak to you in latin about bowels and bile.

you put on lipstick to buoy these new waters, to put a pin in the sodium, to net the crabs of it and drag them to surface, those bottom-feeders.

it’s not wrong, it’s just a new way of having body you haven’t gotten around to naming just yet. you wriggle the knife of yourself, trying to re-sheath blade in this different cover.

if it doesn’t come soon, or ever, push open the cow-skin and demand a new definition of girl and sharp. bend a milked animal into the shape you need, into the kind of cradle all jagged edges need to walk down a street and keep their name clenched between cornea and pupil.

                                          - C. Essington

drawing excerpt.

Not quite a question--I wasn't sure how else to reach out. I just read your story from Hika: Limbo and Other Party Games? Its been on my shelf for ages, I reached for it by happy accident. Desperate to focus on anything but finals, maybe. Usually I'd start a new paragraph here. Tends to be my style. I'm running out of words though, so: I guess I just wanted to thank you. I hope someday I can learn to lose as beautifully as you have. In the meantime, I've pasted it in my notebook. Hope thats ok.

Agh I love hearing from people at Kenyon and I’m honored that you put it in your notebook, that’s amazing. I hope you can gain beautifully! Your reading and caring about it is so appreciated so thank you as well! I hope your finals go well and you get to the other side in a hug of summer that lets you relax. 

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

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 

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 

half way done with college, home and safe in the chlorophylled center of michigan’s palm, okay.