My Lungs, Tonight, Are Fruit- Baskets For The Wind. I Take The Peaches Right Out Of The Blue-clear Blows,

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 

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 

              - 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. 

the fire going down until its just  loose heat and fruit, the quick lisps of faces caught at its edges, those missed-stitches of expression, the looping sugars of eye-contact swimming softly, breathing glow.

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 

I work here as an associate for the Kenyon Review and it’s beautiful and I can’t wait to get back to Gambier Ohio. 

Our office in the snow this morning.

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 

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

Coral and Bone

what should I call it when I wake up feeling like three red strings tied to a lobster tail hung to the rafters, drifting, plated, out of salt?

what should I call it when I knock at skin expecting a girl to answer the door of body,  stutter something about self or assembly or congregation, but only get a dull wafer of silence that melts on my tongue before I can put it to language?

how do you name the not-having, the unstringing of marrow until you come to in the dark as crustacean-meat bound in sowing thread the same color that your heartbeats used to be?

what should I call it when my ribs unfurl like damps towels wringing bloodless water out into the bucket of chest and I hear it, all of it hitting a metal bottom, but don’t feel wrong or scared or even displaced— instead, I just feel out of ghosts to give.

                             - C. Essington