The Desk Lamp As An MRI

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

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

Fire Place

outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.

the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.

our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.

we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.

the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.

                           - C. Essington 

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 

art cuz I haven’t posted in a bit

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. 

agh my finger slipped and I’ve

changed my icon againsosorry

hey just really fast because tomorrow in america, things are occurring, this is a queer-positive, and in general, queer blog that’s safe and small and mostly words. you can send me asks, I can try to offer support as best I can, I’m always willing to attempt to direct people to resources and hotlines. I hope everyone can find safety and comfort, you’re beautiful. we will exist tomorrow and on other days and we’ll be breathing and laughing through the terms of other leaders to come.

feel free to reblog if desired.

best,

c. essingotn

the sky unclenches a mouth or two —  water trips out of the night  with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.

tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the  rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark. 

the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum. 

no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone  at least seven times 

and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here  only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder. 

                                       - c. essington 

- c. essington