Here’s Another Couple Of Photos From My Great Grandfather Axel’s Fishing Trip From 1928. 

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

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

I am in love with your writing x

AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way. 

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. 

For the writing thingy! Lighter, lipstick, Lucky penny, marker, camera. :D

Certainly, thank you.

Inventory:1. Lighter2. Lipstick3. Lucky penny4. Marker5. Camera

Clive roved the blue lipstick over his mouth before leaving, two splinters of periwinkle smirking above his teeth. He’d been letting his hair roar down until it dangled near the same piece of body where his ribs ended. The frays of blonde started getting caught on barbs of his life, one of which was a flick of orange in his sister’s hands that she’d held up too high. His trailing strands got smeared with burning before he smothered the flame and confiscated the lighter. After that, his ribs were abandoned by the black-licked blonde and his hair flew up to perch above his shoulders. 

So he went out, lips blue, hair burnt up to his neck, and his pockets lined with change. The metal discs clinked together, pressing up clouds of lint that gathered like cholesterol under his nails. He’d run his fingertips over the currencies, wearing his thumb down to redness on the edge of a penny and calling the soreness good fortune. When he didn’t have pennies to get his hands blushed on, he’d take out a red crayola marker and draw his own sort of luck across his knuckles. 

Clive kept his lips blue and his hands red and his body out of burning the best he could manage. He’d take a photo of it all in a restaurant bathroom, his eyes lowered into the grain the mirror’s reflection, trying to find the place where his colors met his breath. 

                - C. Essington.

Thank you, this was an interesting list. 

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

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 

Questions? You should send in questions, I have five hours of being alone in a house, I can’t do homework the entire time without breaks. Send questionnnsssss.

(Especially about college, Kenyon, writing, publishing, books etc.) 

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. 

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

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