The Sky Unclenches A Mouth Or Two —  Water Trips Out Of The Night  With The Same Sort Of Muscle Your

Short story of mine published by Spry Magazine— check it out if you have the time and interest to do so. TW for some violence. 

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

Hello

to the new followers. Just broke 600 so, you know, it’s a whole bundle of lovelies. Let me know if you’ve got any questions!

                       - C. Essington

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Hi! Back! Moving over from Twitter. Here’s a recent short story; more to come.

This is about wishing you could eat paint and other things you shouldn’t want.

The Oxonian Review

Colours for a Night

‘You will not get drunk on the long-sober traces of wine that exist inside her skin, you won’t. It is very easy not to ingest these images.

- c. essington

 haven’t posted in a while but today I won the Propper prize for poetry at my college and also I got a nice coffee so

Andromeda in a Skillet

it is early, there’s an egg in the oil-slicked frying pan, frying.

you are somewhere tossing off sleep, rolling over, taking the morning like a prescription

the stairs will wait for you to come down, hunger lining your sock-armored heels.

the night played a game of purple with your eyes and drew violet moons above your cheeks, gibbous.

my love sizzles on the stove-top over butter; it has 92 calories today.

we aren’t really going anywhere, we flex open in the kitchen, stretching our humanities in a honeyed 6 AM

fast is how the egg gets taken, going from shelled to food to some piece of the personhood you’ll call yourself if you had the time.

but we’re still here after the dancing and walking and staining and bills and words and teeth of it, living.

it’s you, the stairs, the night in blood below your eyelids, an egg, the sink. that’s it.

that’s the world.

                                    - C. Essington 

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 

the fire going down until its just  loose heat and fruit, the quick lisps of faces caught at its edges, those missed-stitches of expression, the looping sugars of eye-contact swimming softly, breathing glow.