Sorry For The Little Hiatus. I Was At A Cabin. I Am No Longer At Said Cabin. 

exit music for a sister driving out of state

the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.

I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.

I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.

this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.

                  - c. essington

- c. essington

drawing excerpt.

took a neuro exam, early-voted, found out I’m getting a publication that’s going to pay me for poems, and painted todayp

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT by Melody S. Gee Cooper Dillon, 55 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson - Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives.

This is a review I wrote of Melody Gee's poetry collection "The Dead in Daylight" which is now up on Cleaver magazine's blog.

I love the poems you choose for your page. They're absolutely lovely! :)

Well thank you, your readership is greatly appreciated. 

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Downstream

five fingers stop for the night on a collarbone — pausing like rainwater, the tips pool, and, as round as worlds, they rest like dewdrops. just like dew drops.

dappling over the calcium, the five lucid puddles piano at my skin. the music tunnels inward, bodiless with silence, ghosting sixteenth notes into my synapses.

the weight is liquid, the pressing seeps, I look down through each separate clot of skin and river and see a crush of orange leaves sinking into my chest.

I circle the wrist and uproot its pouring. the feeling prickles off me the same way a boiling pot loses teeth when tugged off the stove.

                               - C. Essington

this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house

my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone

a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.

the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm

that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.

my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells

that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,

still bright, his hair growing like something shocking

that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks

pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire

broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—

like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank

shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair

grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles

so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories

into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence

which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.

he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house

I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong

to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.

I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,

which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.

I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,

how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead

like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.    

                        - c. essington

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