After The English Of The House Has Gone To Sleep

So I’ve been scrounging through this old room in our house we just label the “antique room” and I usually leave it alone. But today I found these old photos from 1928 of my great grandfather Axel on a fishing trip “out west”. 

I wrote some tiny casual poetry and can only hope that Axel, in all of your current nonexistence, you can find it in that twisted shadowed grin to forgive my lingual ramblings. 

 haven’t posted in a while but today I won the Propper prize for poetry at my college and also I got a nice coffee so

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

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. 

~I have a flash fiction piece published in Newfound Journal~

it’s here: http://newfoundjournal.org/current-issue/flash-claire-oleson/

Dried Dates

sitting purple and unkissed on the crests of our lips. is your fish all right tonight or have they drowned it too deep into the cream?

the whole of the night lays soft and creased with sun, like it wasn’t held in the wine we drank but dragged out on the rocks by the shoreline. it feels distant and violet, like a cold bruise or a hickey that you gave to yourself which you can see in the bathroom mirror from the far end of your bedroom. your bedroom, which we keep closed.

even though it’s right here, rounded over tines and tablecloth and third rounds of water. the water which comes on the tongue like it’s been salted by air and muddied with the brine from the bottoms of our shoes that stood on the stoop for so so long.

there is sodium in the lamplight, there is anointing oil shining just behind your irises but you won’t spend it tonight, because we’ve got nothing but dimmest and most practical sugars to bless. besides, the dinner was nice and cost you.

it is not good but it has been soft, the night, the date, I could take it on a hike and know it would not spoil from hours in the heat and sweat of going uphill. we rove around the pit, don’t kiss, and shuck the waxy hide of it on the corners of our “goodnights”

for the sake of health, some people substitute this sort of thing for its betters and broaders and deepers. for the sake of health, you can pit one date and eviscerate it, out of its stretched-globe shape, so it sits only in name and color.

from here, it is pureed with hot water until the mastication of blades yields a warm paste not wholly unlike the first date you had before. this is what you do instead of lofting one white hill of sugar from bag to cup to cake.

this is what you do when you walk away into the damp summer night, ragged with the sharp cuts of car lights, tossed against the plastic edges of being polite for hours.

you take your drenched self home, the whole of you lukewarm and cast into a tepid magenta. 

                                               - C. Essington

After The English of the House Has Gone to Sleep

candle on the wax of a boy’s face, hemorrhaging  light, palpitating the picture into morse code. his eyes comes out  on letters no one reads. 

the bloom of skin skips in and out of the night — a scratched record or a good throw embossed into a flat stone sent, alive, across some river’s softest verse. 

                                          - c. essington

I really like the thought that they're still out there fishing in 1928.

For any newcomers, these are a few more photos of my great grandfather Axel's fishing trip out west. 

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 

changed theme and icon. hoping to post more consistently, it’s been a dense year folks.