The Splinters Float

- c. essington

half way done with college, home and safe in the chlorophylled center of michigan’s palm, okay.

Short story of mine published by Spry Magazine— check it out if you have the time and interest to do so. TW for some violence. 

today the air is dim, oyster-shell dim cut through with sheens of rain, coming from far off, nearly off-screen, with cold signed at the bottom of every cloud-bank.

the sky is longer than the word it takes up or the words it takes down when snow happens in front of the billboards, the ads, going white.

                              - 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 

For the game: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Food: Zucchini bread someone you care about made but burned a little

Location: An empty lighthouse on a cliffside that’s starting to lean out over the tide. 

Thank you. 

Send me a book title in an ask and I’ll reply with a food and a place I think fit with the piece. 

- c. essington

Andromeda in a Skillet

it is early, there’s an egg in the oil-slicked frying pan, frying.

you are somewhere tossing off sleep, rolling over, taking the morning like a prescription

the stairs will wait for you to come down, hunger lining your sock-armored heels.

the night played a game of purple with your eyes and drew violet moons above your cheeks, gibbous.

my love sizzles on the stove-top over butter; it has 92 calories today.

we aren’t really going anywhere, we flex open in the kitchen, stretching our humanities in a honeyed 6 AM

fast is how the egg gets taken, going from shelled to food to some piece of the personhood you’ll call yourself if you had the time.

but we’re still here after the dancing and walking and staining and bills and words and teeth of it, living.

it’s you, the stairs, the night in blood below your eyelids, an egg, the sink. that’s it.

that’s the world.

                                    - C. Essington 

I have been vividly inactive,,,, but now I have an important thing I am very  invested in and excited about!

I won Newfound Org’s 2019 Prose Chapbook Prize ^^^

And Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is my debut collection of surreal short stories from this independent press and it’s out for preorder now in both ebook and print here!

https://newfound.org/product-category/print/chapbooks/prose/claire-oleson/

I’m very proud of this work and so delighted it’s found a home with a press that makes beautiful and hand-bound books.Consider taking a glance if you’ve got a moment or an interest in learning about Magritte or fish guts or Cerberus or gender thank youuuu. 

Why are the peaches in the river and how are they about divorce? Gonna have to find out.

Also consider reblogging to support an independent writer and press in one fell swoop, thanks so much!

sleeping on it

everything about it goes around like a good story which takes a new room on a new tongue every night. I wish I could do the same but I’m not so good at convincing people to give me their time or their teeth or their mornings. 

the idea is that you drop yourself and then recover on waking to find that it all hangs different on the shoulders, is less pink, more amaranth, less the leaves of a turnip flower, more the hollowed chest of a cloud after rain—

go to bed across it, maybe its sheets will muddle into a word, maybe the goose feathers will conspire into a cotton-mouthed dictation, saying ah yes, the breakthrough, the meaning, the good. 

or maybe it’s just the time and how it drags through the dark like the cold body of a fish dragging through a mile of river: just about breathing without meaning to and surviving without intending survival until the thing that almost ate you the night before has starved to death, lost its ribs, its music its importance. or it could be

that you forget after you go under and come up, that if it hurts, it will have a place where it  can stop hurting, and a REM cycle is just a good way to buck the hours  off your nerves, not that it’s particularly curative,  just that it knows how to drown minutes

out of their bodies and yours.

         - c. essington