Excited To Have A Short Story In The Upcoming Issue Of Bridge Eight

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 

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

prof: you use some awkward phrasing in this sentence here

me: me too

prof: what

me, with a brain full of exhausted bees: what

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 

you are amazing. so talented at such a young age.

Hey there anon, you’re so lovely for saying that and maybe feeling it too. I’m working on it, I hope I can continue to write things worthy of transferring from my skull-contents to those of other humans. 

PS I like your sunglasses. 

A tiny piece up on Moonsick Magazine

Fire Place

outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.

the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.

our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.

we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.

the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.

                           - C. Essington 

The Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.

the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.

in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear,  chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.

he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.

he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”

                                - C. Essington 

your writings, especially your poetry are so well done. I get so excited when you post new ones! Your imagery is so strong, but not overpowering and your voice is just wonderful. Please carry on <3

Thank you for your sincerity and kindness, hearing that people read and get something from my 3 a.m. labors makes it enormously more valuable. I will certainly keep hitting keys with my fingernails in sequences that I think embody pretty ideas so long as sweet eyes like yours traipse about the page. 

small scales

through the window’s glass I catch the picture: blackberries cupped  in the inhale of a milky-ceramic bowl.

I spend a few seconds mistaking them for dots of caviar because this house is so nice, because they don’t seem to start or end but mill their dark globes across eachother’s chests — close enough together to trade bodies like clouds swapping weather.

I crack the black eggs and suggestions of fish flash in my head, a pocket-knife clicking open, flanks of silver slicks turning their skin to metal on the light.

then the glimpse of a sleepy blue sheen waking on the dark fruit drains the moment of its ocean; blackberries.

blackberries in the small bowl looking like fish coming on. from here, water is just another word for change. I put another shred of push into my bike and it goes,

away from the window’s false eye and I wonder what else in today could flash open with blue and switch its biology from behind the glass.

- c. essington