Queer Writer, Repd by Janklow & Nesbit, 2020 Center for Fiction Fellow, Brooklyn
202 posts
Latest Posts by claireoleson - Page 2
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
tiny frend drawing. sorry for the bad photo.
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
I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.
I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.
the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.
I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.
it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.
I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.
the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.
the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.
I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.
and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.
- c.essington
hey just really fast because tomorrow in america, things are occurring, this is a queer-positive, and in general, queer blog that’s safe and small and mostly words. you can send me asks, I can try to offer support as best I can, I’m always willing to attempt to direct people to resources and hotlines. I hope everyone can find safety and comfort, you’re beautiful. we will exist tomorrow and on other days and we’ll be breathing and laughing through the terms of other leaders to come.
feel free to reblog if desired.
best,
c. essingotn
I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.
I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.
the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.
I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.
it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.
I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.
the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.
the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.
I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.
and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.
- c.essington
exit music for a sister driving out of state
the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.
I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.
I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.
this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.
- c. essington
I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.
I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.
the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.
I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.
it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.
I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.
the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.
the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.
I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.
and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.
- c.essington
Icing The Bruise
and we pressed the water till it gave way to bone and marble— you, with your voice coated in pond scum, say that muscle must be some afterthought of river and history. even if it’s only a statue’s legs and hurt, there is still a blood to stone if it’s set up as a body.
empathy kicks up like a reflex the size of a carbuncle buried in the side of kneecap.
we go into the forest and lay palms on a riverbed of clay, pushing as if on the chest of someone breathless;
there is a heart to this somewhere— and it can be called up from the sleep of the day like some story where Tiresias keeps his eyes open the whole time and doesn’t tell anyone why.
exit music for a sister driving out of state
the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.
I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.
I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.
this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.
- c. essington
this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house
my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone
a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.
the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm
that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.
my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells
that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,
still bright, his hair growing like something shocking
that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks
pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire
broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—
like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank
shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair
grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles
so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories
into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence
which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.
he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house
I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong
to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.
I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,
which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.
I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,
how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead
like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.
- c. essington
exit music for a sister driving out of state
the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.
I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.
I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.
this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.
- c. essington
A tiny piece up on Moonsick Magazine
A tiny piece up on Moonsick Magazine
this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house
my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone
a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.
the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm
that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.
my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells
that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,
still bright, his hair growing like something shocking
that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks
pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire
broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—
like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank
shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair
grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles
so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories
into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence
which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.
he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house
I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong
to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.
I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,
which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.
I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,
how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead
like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.
- c. essington
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
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
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
this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house
my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone
a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.
the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm
that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.
my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells
that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,
still bright, his hair growing like something shocking
that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks
pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire
broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—
like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank
shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair
grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles
so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories
into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence
which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.
he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house
I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong
to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.
I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,
which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.
I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,
how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead
like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.
- c. essington
tiny painting for a small day/
it’s not sunday but it felt like one because
work is sloww
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.
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.
tiny painting for a small day/
it’s not sunday but it felt like one because
work is sloww
changed theme and icon. hoping to post more consistently, it’s been a dense year folks.
Ten Places You Must Visit After You’ve Died
the fence which circles your backyard like a wedding band squeezes tight around the fingers of overgrown grass— no one’s home but the house still spills with voices, somehow. now, if you look out of your left-hand window, you’ll see we’re passing the sahara.
you ought to hire your own sherpa, trusting a company will never do, the crest of everest resembles the corners of your mother’s eyes too much for you to see. you say no thank you and start on down alone.
in a flurry of mortality, you buy a ticket for a cruise trip which happens on a boat just big enough to make you feel like you’re never on a boat— a floating nowhere suspended above the saltwater. the only people crying are children, which is a good sign, it means that things are going largely well and the only things going wrong are happening to lost toys and the bright braids of small girls. it might be good here. you heave last night’s crab over the port side, yes, it’s all good here.
- c. essington
Ten Places You Must Visit After You’ve Died
the fence which circles your backyard like a wedding band squeezes tight around the fingers of overgrown grass— no one’s home but the house still spills with voices, somehow. now, if you look out of your left-hand window, you’ll see we’re passing the sahara.
you ought to hire your own sherpa, trusting a company will never do, the crest of everest resembles the corners of your mother’s eyes too much for you to see. you say no thank you and start on down alone.
in a flurry of mortality, you buy a ticket for a cruise trip which happens on a boat just big enough to make you feel like you’re never on a boat— a floating nowhere suspended above the saltwater. the only people crying are children, which is a good sign, it means that things are going largely well and the only things going wrong are happening to lost toys and the bright braids of small girls. it might be good here. you heave last night’s crab over the port side, yes, it’s all good here.
- c. essington
ha ha published in the Limestone 30th Anniversary anthology with Wendell Berry it’s chill
took a neuro exam, early-voted, found out I’m getting a publication that’s going to pay me for poems, and painted todayp
color palettes
- c. essington