I Work For This Publication — It’s A Really Wonderful Experience And The Product It Creates Brings

my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.

the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.

                                   - 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

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 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.

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

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 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

some of them have hands that are on knife-hilts all the time, walking Macbeths who keep repeating marriage vows to excuse the stainless steel between their fingers; they cannot tell their wedding bands from the bands of light glinting off blades used forty one times on bread-crust and one time on something else.

                    - C. Essington 

top 5 favorite books?

Oh gosh. As of right now, and this is heavily based on what I’ve read recently, these are some I really like (in no particular order): 

1. Limber - Angela Pelster

2. Crush and War of the Foxes - Richard Siken (both are poetry books and make me so angry how good they are)

3. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe

4. The Things They carried - Tim O’Brien 

5. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson (any of them, I’m serious) 

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

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