Tangerineinklings - Blog Posts
small scales
through the window’s glass I catch the picture: blackberries cupped in the inhale of a milky-ceramic bowl.
I spend a few seconds mistaking them for dots of caviar because this house is so nice, because they don’t seem to start or end but mill their dark globes across eachother’s chests — close enough together to trade bodies like clouds swapping weather.
I crack the black eggs and suggestions of fish flash in my head, a pocket-knife clicking open, flanks of silver slicks turning their skin to metal on the light.
then the glimpse of a sleepy blue sheen waking on the dark fruit drains the moment of its ocean; blackberries.
blackberries in the small bowl looking like fish coming on. from here, water is just another word for change. I put another shred of push into my bike and it goes,
away from the window’s false eye and I wonder what else in today could flash open with blue and switch its biology from behind the glass.
- 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.
A tiny piece up on Moonsick Magazine
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
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.
color palettes
- c. essington
A poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver Magazine.
The Kiss - c. essington (After Gustav Klimt)
someone spent too much time on something.
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
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
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
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
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
I’ve had a short story published on the literary blog, The Whale.
I will have a flash fiction piece published in this coming issue of werkloos!
we’re very excited to announce the launch date of our second issue, in limbo. keep your eyes peeled & your hearts steady, things are about to get lit.
cover image by the talented @ernestvolynec
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
~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
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
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
Fire Place
outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.
the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.
our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.
we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.
the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.
- C. Essington
The Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.
the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.
in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear, chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.
he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.
he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”
- C. Essington
Joan of Arc’s Area Code
I have kept the fire on hold for eight months now- the dial tone is burning my left ear into decibels of charcoal.
I have re-recorded my answering message to say that I am out of town (and also newly made of ash and second-story window exits.)
I have slept next to the receiver, receiving, as the blips of flame came at me like candle light.
I know that, on the other side of the spiraling teal cord, there is an orange and a yellow and a red all gnawing through the same heated throat, all of its light just waiting to get to the talking.
But I do not want to start with the hellos or the incinerations; I would like to skip the going down and get right to the coming up for air- as though this were water, as though all the ocean’s burning salts were synonymous to a lit stove.
I want the after photo — the stale, post-noise sound of nothing happening. That saw-tooth quiet coming in like a wave.
I want the lost-conversation hum of the house being suddenly empty and the me being suddenly not on fire —
the phone cradled in a soft, home-dialed, plastic-blue.
- C. Essingotn