Queer Writer, Repd by Janklow & Nesbit, 2020 Center for Fiction Fellow, Brooklyn
202 posts
Latest Posts by claireoleson - Page 5
what food would go with the necronomicon?
Uh a single saltine on grey plate that you swear you ate but keeps popping up again, always tasting like it has a little more salt each time.
- 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
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
The Desk Lamp as an MRI
waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.
beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.
the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.
she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.
she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
- C. Essington
Memoirs Don’t Need Dedications
when Ahmed stopped being able to press on the morning, to work the light into a way of seeing so he could do something drastic, like make it down the hallway, he took a moment to donate his whole body back to himself.
he wrenched marrow and incisors and the corners of his dog-eared heartbeats (which he had been saving to give to someone else) out of the intention of saving, and he put them back in his own chest and let them howl there.
when he realized that all this felt like stealing, he understood how far from his own lungs he must have been breathing.
- C. Essington
~I have a flash fiction piece published in Newfound Journal~
it’s here: http://newfoundjournal.org/current-issue/flash-claire-oleson/
~I have a flash fiction piece published in Newfound Journal~
it’s here: http://newfoundjournal.org/current-issue/flash-claire-oleson/
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
my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.
the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.
- C. Essington
- 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
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
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
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
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
I work for Meggie Royer and this is so cool that this is happening again. In all ways, it’s totally worth the time and effort I’ve put in to be able to be a little part of this beautiful/ important thing.
Issue 2 of my literary magazine is now officially live! Thank you to my beautiful, empowering staff for making a second issue possible - we did it. Twice.
To all the abuse survivors whose work is featured in this issue, and all the survivors who will read this issue, and all the survivors in the world - you are the dreamers and the magicians, the dancers and the risen. You are not the left-behind. You are the still-here.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your healing. <3
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
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
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
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
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
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
Downstream
five fingers stop for the night on a collarbone — pausing like rainwater, the tips pool, and, as round as worlds, they rest like dewdrops. just like dew drops.
dappling over the calcium, the five lucid puddles piano at my skin. the music tunnels inward, bodiless with silence, ghosting sixteenth notes into my synapses.
the weight is liquid, the pressing seeps, I look down through each separate clot of skin and river and see a crush of orange leaves sinking into my chest.
I circle the wrist and uproot its pouring. the feeling prickles off me the same way a boiling pot loses teeth when tugged off the stove.
- C. Essington
You mentioned Richard Siken in an earlier ask - how do you find new contemporary poets to read?
Largely by asking other readers and or writers who they like. Also by engaging with people who are also emerging writers. Artists supporting artists is great and super underrated.
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.
Is there one particular experience that you draw on in your writing?
There’s no one singular experience, no. It’s usually a mash of a lot of things and they vary a lot depending on what I’m trying to say. Like a potato, a mashed potato of feelings and thoughts. With butter. I write potatoes, end transcript.
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.
top 5 favorite books?
Oh gosh. As of right now, and this is heavily based on what I’ve read recently, these are some I really like (in no particular order):
1. Limber - Angela Pelster
2. Crush and War of the Foxes - Richard Siken (both are poetry books and make me so angry how good they are)
3. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
4. The Things They carried - Tim O’Brien
5. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson (any of them, I’m serious)
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.