The Kiss - C. Essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

kayaking in the winter           means you’re confident or lonely

running uphill until everything, including your name, hurts          means that there is something in your body which          you’ve missed missing.

writing codes in plain english out of words that          symbolize nothing but themselves          means you’ve taken up poetry again          and should stop or get a kayak by this time, next december.

- c. essington

in a bite of lamplight, he stands up to say I love you. he says it slow so he can feel it in his mouth, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete. 

              - c. essington

- c. essington

Practicing Herpetology From The Corner Table

flick a glance towards a lit sample of stranger. it’s a quick, hinged exercise, an in-and-out of knife — something woven from the same speed as a snake-tongue that jousts the air with one rattle of investigation at its end just before all sense is yanked back between the eyes’ own teeth.

revisiting is dangerous and dwelling is a form of coiling: a suffocation from across the room where you re-wrap your staring around bones and bones of detail, crushing.

spend too long and you will leave drips of yourself behind, a scale of iris-color, a clear stretch of skin that will give away the bridge of your nose, the rise of your cheeks, the fall of a mouth — how it cradles the air.

the looking ought to work like the click of a microscope slide hitching into the mandibles of sight: here is your speck of clarity, your second-long bite of flagellum and pond water.

memorize the chin, the glasses, the hands, burrowed with the ceramic-blue of veins, the shoreline of hair starting, the half-moons of eyebrows, the lips that twitch with the rims of words, the slide of ears that work to drink the sound, the pupils cast (thankfully) down towards some dim elsewhere. write it down on a fold of brain, nowhere else, and get back to your own heartbeat.

                        - C. Essington 

What's your favorite place in the world? Where would you most like to travel to?

I don’t think I have a particularly favorite place just yet. I’d really love to go to Ireland or Scotland. I went to London once to visit my uncle, and I have to say that was very beautiful. 

- c. essington

              - C. Essington

I am in love with your writing x

AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way. 

Comment: I really love Goldfish crackers (I am currently eating some and it's making my day 184849 times better).

This very cute and happy thank you. I found free pizza tonight so I am in a similar cheese-induced state of happiness. Keep on keeping on. 

drawing excerpt.