I’ve Had A Short Story Published On The Literary Blog, The Whale.

- 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

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

are you for real about the writing game? If so I'm carrying; A small browning pocket knife A compass + whistle Allergy medicine Water bottle Extra battery charge for my phone

I am for real. Thank you for your contribution and interest. 

Inventory: 1. A small browning pocket knife 2. A compass + whistle 3. Allergy medicine 4. Water bottle 5.Extra battery charge for my phone

Cleo had been painting when the first bout of thunder came up her shoulders. The tip of her brush, which was dappled with a carefully mixed hazle, spasmed across the canvas with her seizure. The cornea of her subject’s eye blurred out of his head and spilled down his coat. When the clouds stopped ricocheting through her, Cleo had gotten up and walked away from what she’d done to the acrylics. 

She stayed far away from precision after she learned that the storms had taken up a residence in her brain. Moving towards broader strokes of being, Cleo made abstractions where her seizures looked just the same as something she might have done on purpose. She carried abstractions with her and started walking through the birch woods as another form of smearing. She brought a compass but left intentions of reading it at home where the cat slept. She brought a knife to convince herself that, in a case of emergency, and even mid-seizure, the blade could convulse a mess into any sort of aggressor.

Cleo would walk and fall and shake to stillness on the forest floor, shivering like a dropped cornea. She’d call her mother after, but only after. She would get up once she was alone and unmarried from the movement, drink water, and make call on her cell phone, which she kept well-charged for accident. Sometimes, as the oceans of it leaked out of her and left their salts behind on her nerves, she’d take a dose of allergy medicine to keep the cottonwood from bothering her. 

               - C. Essington

Thank you for the opportunity, I hope it’s alright. 

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

Writing Game

I want to do a thing where people can send me asks of five objects someone is carrying with them, a little personal inventory, and I’ll write a little flash fiction piece developing a person around the things.

Please maybe? 

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

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. 

              - 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

Advice for someone wanting to get published?

Okay, here are my top 3 tips based purely on my experience on both the submitting and accepting/ rejecting side of publications.

1. Proofread - nothing sets your piece back more if it’s on the fence of being accepted than grammatical errors that are easy to remedy.

2. Research publications before submitting - Databases for publishers like the one offered by Poets and writer’s (http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines) are really helpful for finding publications that may be looking for your style/ genre of writing.

3. Look for small, maybe even local publishers at first - They are more likely to have the time to really look at your work if you’re submitting for the first time and are much more likely, if they give you a rejection letter, to reject with reasons saying why and explaining what they also may have liked in the piece.

*Also know that rejection happens to everyone!! Keep writing and trying and researching. Sometimes thorough and kind rejection letters are even more helpful in the long-run than acceptance letters that tell you nothing of why you were accepted.

I hope this helps! 

Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.