Fire Place

Toad-Stomach

a cream-with-mushrooms color; ducked, formless, curtaining an animal that isn’t too much more than a way of moving cold blood in and out of brain.  the whole little inch hints at mud and comfort and the paper-thick line between guts and ground.

- c. essington 

werkloos spring 2016

werkloos mag's second issue, "in limbo"

I’ve got a piece published in the second issue of werkloos, an online journal. It’s a flash fiction piece starting on page 17 called “Red Velvets”. Give it a look if you have a moment and a speck of interest, thanks! 

PS I adore hearing what people think, so feedback is uber welcome. 

(https://issuu.com/werkloosmag/docs/werkloos_spring_2016?e=22031949/36085278)

Just that 

I’m here for all LGBTQ members and let me know if you need to talk and or be directed to professional resources and also I love you; our existence is not a crime. 

your writing is honestly amazing you have a lot of talent wow

Thank you so much for taking a look, I really appreciate it. Having people who care about words make it all worth while. 

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 

color palettes

               - c. essington 

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

For the writing thingy! Lighter, lipstick, Lucky penny, marker, camera. :D

Certainly, thank you.

Inventory:1. Lighter2. Lipstick3. Lucky penny4. Marker5. Camera

Clive roved the blue lipstick over his mouth before leaving, two splinters of periwinkle smirking above his teeth. He’d been letting his hair roar down until it dangled near the same piece of body where his ribs ended. The frays of blonde started getting caught on barbs of his life, one of which was a flick of orange in his sister’s hands that she’d held up too high. His trailing strands got smeared with burning before he smothered the flame and confiscated the lighter. After that, his ribs were abandoned by the black-licked blonde and his hair flew up to perch above his shoulders. 

So he went out, lips blue, hair burnt up to his neck, and his pockets lined with change. The metal discs clinked together, pressing up clouds of lint that gathered like cholesterol under his nails. He’d run his fingertips over the currencies, wearing his thumb down to redness on the edge of a penny and calling the soreness good fortune. When he didn’t have pennies to get his hands blushed on, he’d take out a red crayola marker and draw his own sort of luck across his knuckles. 

Clive kept his lips blue and his hands red and his body out of burning the best he could manage. He’d take a photo of it all in a restaurant bathroom, his eyes lowered into the grain the mirror’s reflection, trying to find the place where his colors met his breath. 

                - C. Essington.

Thank you, this was an interesting list. 

If you want to play this writing game, send me a theoretical inventory of five items in an ask and I’ll try to write a person for it. 

The Desk Lamp as an MRI

waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.

beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.

the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.

she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.

she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.

                                                 - C. Essington

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!