How To Take A Radial Pulse

changed theme and icon. hoping to post more consistently, it’s been a dense year folks. 

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.) 

Not super important but my abroad application is finished! Hopefully I’ll get to study at Exeter in England next year. Anyone go there/ know info about it or want to share their experience? 

              - C. Essington

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. 

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. 

Engine Flooding

You can see the cellphone, flushed teal underneath at least three feet of water, shiver when the pond’s surface gets frayed by the wind. You are on your hands and knees.

Just had a short fiction piece published by Maudlin House! Please consider taking a look if you have the interest and a speck of time to do so. 

I’d also love to hear what anyone thinks about it, any comments/ critiques would be immensely appreciated. 

http://maudlinhouse.net/engine-flooding/

Writing game: How about a phone number scribbled on a bit of paper, two dollars in change, a pen, a receipt for a restaurant, and a pack of cigarettes?

Sure thing, thank you. 

Inventory:1. A phone number scribbled on bit of paper2. Two dollars in change3. A pen4. A receipt for a restaurant 5. A pack of cigarettes

There is a piece of paper in my pocket, folded twice over, like pigeon’s wings, or my tongue in a fight, or how I sleep when I’m sad. It’s white with black print and it says that I should be full by now. There’s also receipt from my dinner. After eating through six truffle mushrooms curled in oil and laid over pasta, I left with some coins in my pocket and not much else, my mouth ringing with salt and linguini and fungi I can’t afford but swallowed anyway. 

I’m not full yet despite the seven digits that sit like a brand by my left thigh, so I take out ink and cross them into black hashes. There is being bloated and there is being starving and I’d rather fit in one of those places than be left alone in the middle, a stranger’s affection listed to me in numbers. 

I light something and watch it dwindle, a white column of paper singing in orange and going grey. I think that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing too. It’s not great, I’m still hungry and aching and made of willow leaves and molars, but I can stand upright in my name and store my grievances on the dark sides of my quarters and breathe like I love it, but don’t really have a reason for it all the time.  

           - C. Essington

Thank you for this and your support,

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. 

Creon Tells Antigone To Keep Her Arms At Her Sides When She Runs

Before the rope stippled with green pages of lichen is tied by hands, by mind, on purpose — Before the unburied brother with his chest surrendered to the wind, heart as still as a stone sunk to river-bottom — Before the girl tore off her name, swallowed it like a sword, and cursed her sister to live a lovely life, Creon sat with the blade-eater  in the clutch of a marble chamber and talked to her in the dim slip of evening, backstage.

The chorus ran their tongues over a grooved government, lapping at stone for honey, while Antigone, with her pitch-dark hands, smoothed her  skirt into an eddy. 

Creon tells her it’s a nice knot, that she knows how to tie, she says she’s a sailor, her eyes fixed forward toward the barred wall, moonlight coming in like piano keys, she plays at the strands of string in the rope.

She says she’s a sailor, that she can always feel the water, that she feels it now, how it curves  around her brother’s aorta as a courtesy, but will soon lend it to coral polyps shaped like loveliness, as the water always does.

His hand slides over the cold bench towards her crossed legs. In her head she covers his thumb with six-feet of soil. She holds the rope tighter, tracing the strands, feels her father’s tongue somewhere between wires, then bites it between two fingernails. The hand moves back.

When you run, he says, his eyes on the music of the iron bars, When you run, after you puppet yourself on this ceiling and leave two fingers of air between your neck and the world,  do not let your elbows leak up passed your waist — it would only make your shoulders look tight, like your dad’s.

He had tight shoulders? she asks, her voice slipping under a loud question from the chorus, yes, Creon agrees with himself, tight shoulders and a mole on his clavicle, tight shoulders, among other things.

                                                    - 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