Queer Writer, Repd by Janklow & Nesbit, 2020 Center for Fiction Fellow, Brooklyn
202 posts
Latest Posts by claireoleson - Page 3
color palettes
- c. essington
The Kiss - c. essington (After Gustav Klimt)
someone spent too much time on something.
A poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver Magazine.
The Kiss - c. essington (After Gustav Klimt)
someone spent too much time on something.
Coral and Bone
what should I call it when I wake up feeling like three red strings tied to a lobster tail hung to the rafters, drifting, plated, out of salt?
what should I call it when I knock at skin expecting a girl to answer the door of body, stutter something about self or assembly or congregation, but only get a dull wafer of silence that melts on my tongue before I can put it to language?
how do you name the not-having, the unstringing of marrow until you come to in the dark as crustacean-meat bound in sowing thread the same color that your heartbeats used to be?
what should I call it when my ribs unfurl like damps towels wringing bloodless water out into the bucket of chest and I hear it, all of it hitting a metal bottom, but don’t feel wrong or scared or even displaced— instead, I just feel out of ghosts to give.
- C. Essington
agh my finger slipped and I’ve
changed my icon againsosorry
okay but [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith is it
- 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
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
Sorry for the little hiatus. I was at a cabin. I am no longer at said cabin.
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
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
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 work for this publication — it’s a really wonderful experience and the product it creates brings a set of lungs to many important voices! Please consider sending in yours.
Submissions are open until July 18th for our third issue! We want your poetry prose and art. We want your stories.
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
kayaking in the winter means you’re confident or lonely
running uphill until everything, including your name, hurts means that there is something in your body which you’ve missed missing.
writing codes in plain english out of words that symbolize nothing but themselves means you’ve taken up poetry again and should stop or get a kayak by this time, next december.
- c. essington
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
- c. essington
kayaking in the winter means you’re confident or lonely
running uphill until everything, including your name, hurts means that there is something in your body which you’ve missed missing.
writing codes in plain english out of words that symbolize nothing but themselves means you’ve taken up poetry again and should stop or get a kayak by this time, next december.
- c. essington
- c. essington
the first anatomically realistic drawing of a human heart meant that someone had to stop living and then, before they were set in the ground or burnt to ash for a sort of kept loss, someone else had to raise a hand, softly, and say
“wait.”
- c. essington
This is a review I wrote of Melody Gee's poetry collection "The Dead in Daylight" which is now up on Cleaver magazine's blog.
This came a couple days ago, the fourth issue of Bridge Eight, and it’s beautiful and has a story of mine in it and it’s lovely to have a physical copy of.
Those were people. They were targeted for belonging to the LGBTQ community. This was an attack on LGBTQ people, not an attack on “anyone trying to have a night out” or “anyone who’s offended by the shooting”.
Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34.
Stanley Almodovar III, 23.
Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20.
Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22.
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36.
Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22.
Luis S. Vielma, 22.
Kimberly Morris, 37.
Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30.
Darryl Roman Burt II, 29.
Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32.
Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21.
Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25.
Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35.
Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50.
Amanda Alvear, 25.
Martin Benitez Torres, 33.
Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37.
Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26.
Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35.
Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25.
Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31.
Oscar A. Aracena-Montero, 26.
Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 years old.
Miguel Angel Honorato, 30 years old.
Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40 years old.
Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 years old
Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 years old
Cory James Connell, 21 years old
Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37 years old
Luis Daniel Conde, 39 years old
Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 years old
Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25 years old
Jerald Arthur Wright, 31
Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25
Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25
Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24
Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, 27
Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33
Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49
Yilmary Rodriguez Sulivan, 24
Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32
Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28
Frank Hernandez, 27
Paul Terrell Henry, 41
You will not be forgotten.
Just that
I’m here for all LGBTQ members and let me know if you need to talk and or be directed to professional resources and also I love you; our existence is not a crime.
the sky unclenches a mouth or two — water trips out of the night with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.
tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark.
the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum.
no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone at least seven times
and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder.
- c. essington
in a bite of lamplight, he stands up to say I love you. he says it slow so he can feel it in his mouth, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete.
- c. essington