Downstream

Your writing is gorgeous. I don't understand, and I do, and it doesn't matter because your lines make me ache. Thanks for spilling.

ahhhhh thank you so much. That’s what I do it for largely, the validation and transmitting of emotion from one body to others. Writing belongs to interpretation, and I may have made it, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to its readers’ thoughts and reactions. I just put my name at the bottom so people can know where it came from. 

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

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

but what if it were

nice/ honeyed/ came with its own heart/ already done up in light blue muslin and set to music, wait, the right music.

and what if it 

didn’t hurt (too much)/ came soft in places like the sky comes whole/ and looked like cream and felt like it too and worked like it too. 

and what if

a pulse doesn’t have to feel like a punchline that keeps getting told without a joke to explain it/ (get it, get it, get it)/ and a life doesn’t have to feel like a pressure/ and your head doesn’t always have to be the thing that starts you and ends you and is you. 

                                         - c. essington 

Your blog rocks babe✌

Well thank you so much for your readership, you’re very kind. 

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 

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

Not super important but my abroad application is finished! Hopefully I’ll get to study at Exeter in England next year. Anyone go there/ know info about it or want to share their experience? 

one gallon of wind skims over us, drying sharply in our nerves like  some font set too large for us to read— I think I can make out the four-way stop of a “t”  unfolding its cold phoneme across my chest. 

                                      - c. essington

Advice for someone wanting to get published?

Okay, here are my top 3 tips based purely on my experience on both the submitting and accepting/ rejecting side of publications.

1. Proofread - nothing sets your piece back more if it’s on the fence of being accepted than grammatical errors that are easy to remedy.

2. Research publications before submitting - Databases for publishers like the one offered by Poets and writer’s (http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines) are really helpful for finding publications that may be looking for your style/ genre of writing.

3. Look for small, maybe even local publishers at first - They are more likely to have the time to really look at your work if you’re submitting for the first time and are much more likely, if they give you a rejection letter, to reject with reasons saying why and explaining what they also may have liked in the piece.

*Also know that rejection happens to everyone!! Keep writing and trying and researching. Sometimes thorough and kind rejection letters are even more helpful in the long-run than acceptance letters that tell you nothing of why you were accepted.

I hope this helps! 

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