The Desk Lamp As An MRI

your writings, especially your poetry are so well done. I get so excited when you post new ones! Your imagery is so strong, but not overpowering and your voice is just wonderful. Please carry on <3

Thank you for your sincerity and kindness, hearing that people read and get something from my 3 a.m. labors makes it enormously more valuable. I will certainly keep hitting keys with my fingernails in sequences that I think embody pretty ideas so long as sweet eyes like yours traipse about the page. 

prof: you use some awkward phrasing in this sentence here

me: me too

prof: what

me, with a brain full of exhausted bees: what

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. 

half way done with college, home and safe in the chlorophylled center of michigan’s palm, okay.

So I’ve been scrounging through this old room in our house we just label the “antique room” and I usually leave it alone. But today I found these old photos from 1928 of my great grandfather Axel on a fishing trip “out west”. 

I wrote some tiny casual poetry and can only hope that Axel, in all of your current nonexistence, you can find it in that twisted shadowed grin to forgive my lingual ramblings. 

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

Keep posting your art! I love your writing, but the art is definitely a nice touch and I really enjoy seeing it :)

Well thank you so much, I was hoping it wasn’t annoying. 

okay but [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith is it

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 

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