Small Scales

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 

some of them have hands that are on knife-hilts all the time, walking Macbeths who keep repeating marriage vows to excuse the stainless steel between their fingers; they cannot tell their wedding bands from the bands of light glinting off blades used forty one times on bread-crust and one time on something else.

                    - C. Essington 

color palettes

               - 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. 

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 

How To Take A Radial Pulse

maybe this has been one of those nights that I’ll come back to later, to outline in crayon and label softly, drawing looks out from the eyes like water from a well. well,

all days have sore ribs, burnt nerves, places which go tender under threat but this one feels like something particularly loose and abused enough already, something which will just  go to heaven if it’s ever touched again.

there is something memorable about hours way too made of blood to ever bleed. 

it’s not going to hurt to put fingers on this: the dim around the pizza box around the carpet around the working anatomies around the exactly seven kidneys. 

it’s not going to hurt it’s just going to all come back in through the palm, one pressure at a time, working just like the un-music a heart makes to keep a head. 

                                   - 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!

Writing Workshop Launch!

We’re excited to announce that Siblíní is hosting a Summer Writing Workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the month of July!

We’re currently accepting applications from high school and college-age students who are interested in learning more about creative writing and publication opportunities. For more information and to apply, please visit our website. 

http://www.siblinijournal.com/#!writing-workshop/o95nw

If able, any reblogging of this opportunity would be immensely appreciated!

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Here’s a poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver magazine. 

are you for real about the writing game? If so I'm carrying; A small browning pocket knife A compass + whistle Allergy medicine Water bottle Extra battery charge for my phone

I am for real. Thank you for your contribution and interest. 

Inventory: 1. A small browning pocket knife 2. A compass + whistle 3. Allergy medicine 4. Water bottle 5.Extra battery charge for my phone

Cleo had been painting when the first bout of thunder came up her shoulders. The tip of her brush, which was dappled with a carefully mixed hazle, spasmed across the canvas with her seizure. The cornea of her subject’s eye blurred out of his head and spilled down his coat. When the clouds stopped ricocheting through her, Cleo had gotten up and walked away from what she’d done to the acrylics. 

She stayed far away from precision after she learned that the storms had taken up a residence in her brain. Moving towards broader strokes of being, Cleo made abstractions where her seizures looked just the same as something she might have done on purpose. She carried abstractions with her and started walking through the birch woods as another form of smearing. She brought a compass but left intentions of reading it at home where the cat slept. She brought a knife to convince herself that, in a case of emergency, and even mid-seizure, the blade could convulse a mess into any sort of aggressor.

Cleo would walk and fall and shake to stillness on the forest floor, shivering like a dropped cornea. She’d call her mother after, but only after. She would get up once she was alone and unmarried from the movement, drink water, and make call on her cell phone, which she kept well-charged for accident. Sometimes, as the oceans of it leaked out of her and left their salts behind on her nerves, she’d take a dose of allergy medicine to keep the cottonwood from bothering her. 

               - C. Essington

Thank you for the opportunity, I hope it’s alright. 

If you want to play this writing game, send me a theoretical inventory of five items and I’ll try to write a person for it.