I’m Teaching This Workshop With Another Published And Accomplished Author! We Aim To Teach What High

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 

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.

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 

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

I ate two kumquats and just have one final exam left so we just gotta power through, kids.

 I don’t know who the kids are, but they get it. 

- c. essington

A poem I recently had published by Zetetic Record.

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 

- c. essington