Some Of Them Have Hands That Are On Knife-hilts All The Time, Walking Macbeths Who Keep Repeating Marriage

werkloos spring 2016

werkloos mag's second issue, "in limbo"

I've got a piece published in the second issue of werkloos, an online journal. It's a flash fiction piece starting on page 17 called “Red Velvets”. Give it a look if you have a moment and a speck of interest, thanks! 

PS I adore hearing what people think, so feedback is uber welcome. 

(https://issuu.com/werkloosmag/docs/werkloos_spring_2016?e=22031949/36085278)

in a bite of lamplight, he stands up to say I love you. he says it slow so he can feel it in his mouth, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete. 

              - c. essington

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

Hi lovely, again, I am in awe of your beautiful words. I had a question though, if you don't mind. Do you have any tips for someone who is working on pursuing their writing more regularly? I used to write, but have gotten out of practice and am looking for anything to help me start again. Thank you!

Of course, thanks for all of your support. Tumblr's been helpful to me, I try to put up at least one thing a day, even if it's gross and not a thing. 

Calendars can aid one's efforts if you have a word count goal in mind. But if you're looking less for clerical things and more for inspiration, the best tip I have is to notice things, really notice things. And always have notebook to pin interesting tidbits to the page, this lets you have spare ingredients for stewing something together later. It's like a form of collecting. Also spy on people, not aggressively, but try to see them in a real way. 

When you eat, try to know how and why you're doing it and what's going over your tongue. When you sleep, pay attention to how you slip from yourself. You do not need to have fallen from a boat in a storm to write well about someone falling from a boat in a storm. If you've eaten a lime and fallen asleep I think you can manage to write it pretty well for a general audience. Don't be afraid to cross things over into areas where they seemingly don't belong, and try not to be afraid to look odd in words.

Ah, sorry, a touch long if you were looking for a one-liner. I am not Hemingway-esc, I spend a long time on little things. 

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 

I am in love with your writing x

AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way. 

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 

DISINHERITANCE by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Language is almost intuitively understood as a tool for possession—a form of communication which allow us to hold and deliver ideas between minds. However, John Sibley Williams’s latest poetry collection, Disinheritance, demonstrates how language itself is anything but concrete or possessable.

A poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver Magazine. 

hello- i just wanted to say your writing has inspired me greatly- the way you string words together is truly beautiful- like a spiderweb- so delicate and whimsical yet meticulous and wondrous. I have yet to share my work with those outside my immediate family, but you inspire me to shout my words from the tops of mountains and into the clouds, even if all i ever hear back is the echo of my own voice. your work embeds deep emotions from within and reminds me that writing can affect people deeply

Hello there, thank you for your readership and kindness, I’m so glad I can move something in you. And of course, put your words where you feel comfortable, but if you do ever decide to post or publish, let me know and I’ll be happy to read anything. Also, sidenote, sounds like you might like Walt Whitman, you should check the fella out if you haven’t already.

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