Sleeping On It

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. 

Heading back to my college to spend the summer working for the Kenyon Review!

ha ha published in the Limestone 30th Anniversary anthology with Wendell Berry it’s chill 

Coral and Bone

what should I call it when I wake up feeling like three red strings tied to a lobster tail hung to the rafters, drifting, plated, out of salt?

what should I call it when I knock at skin expecting a girl to answer the door of body,  stutter something about self or assembly or congregation, but only get a dull wafer of silence that melts on my tongue before I can put it to language?

how do you name the not-having, the unstringing of marrow until you come to in the dark as crustacean-meat bound in sowing thread the same color that your heartbeats used to be?

what should I call it when my ribs unfurl like damps towels wringing bloodless water out into the bucket of chest and I hear it, all of it hitting a metal bottom, but don’t feel wrong or scared or even displaced— instead, I just feel out of ghosts to give.

                             - C. Essington

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

tiny painting for a small day/

it’s not sunday but it felt like one because

work is sloww

Your writing is gorgeous. I don't understand, and I do, and it doesn't matter because your lines make me ache. Thanks for spilling.

ahhhhh thank you so much. That’s what I do it for largely, the validation and transmitting of emotion from one body to others. Writing belongs to interpretation, and I may have made it, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to its readers’ thoughts and reactions. I just put my name at the bottom so people can know where it came from. 

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.) 

but what if it were

nice/ honeyed/ came with its own heart/ already done up in light blue muslin and set to music, wait, the right music.

and what if it 

didn’t hurt (too much)/ came soft in places like the sky comes whole/ and looked like cream and felt like it too and worked like it too. 

and what if

a pulse doesn’t have to feel like a punchline that keeps getting told without a joke to explain it/ (get it, get it, get it)/ and a life doesn’t have to feel like a pressure/ and your head doesn’t always have to be the thing that starts you and ends you and is you. 

                                         - c. essington 

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT by Melody S. Gee Cooper Dillon, 55 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson - Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives.

This is a review I wrote of Melody Gee's poetry collection "The Dead in Daylight" which is now up on Cleaver magazine's blog.