- C. Essington

I covered her neck with my left palm as I carried her up the hill. I’d been letting my hair grow and it had been growing fast, slipping my whole body back into the version of “girl” my grandparents understood. Oh, she wasn’t heavy, just cold and still. My hair grew down in tens of cowlicks, each edge gesturing out differently, looking like briar or a shoddy charcoal drawing. Underneath my palm, I could feel the pocket-knife slits of gill studding her thyroid. I knew the house, which burned and simmered in its yellow glow, was empty. I knew my hair ended around my clavicle, jutting off suddenly like scorpion tails.

Her rib cage was slight, her skin almost like a frog’s in its sheen and lichen-colored tint. I carried her up the hill and it didn’t even exhaust me. My hair got in my eyes, making it seem like I was hiking through a bramble patch. But the air was clear and the dark was building itself up like a good story. I wondered where I’d end. Her breathing seemed to come off from miles away, all of it slow and tired and as if it had touched the mountains before it bled out from her mouth. What she’d been doing, what she’d been being, I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen anything like her before, but I tend to be a calm person, so I am okay with what’s terrifying and what’s new and what’s soft to carry uphill.

Once we’re at the door, I kick the handle in and the yellow hits us like a pierced yolk pooling across ceramic. I set her on the table, her long body composing its life distantly. I get water from the tap and fill a glass and drink it while leaning on the counter. She turns once in her sleep. I think she can breathe the air. She’s been looking like she can. I suspect she’ll be up soon. I wonder what she speaks, if she speaks at all. I wonder if she’s ever killed someone. I wonder if her hair grows fast, jeweled here and there with clots of duckweed, slipping over her eyes when she works hard. I will go fill the bathtub. I will carry lilly pads up from the pond in my palms, holding their floppy lives close to my sweater. 

I will ask if she likes acrylics or the wind or staying in bed on saturdays. I’m sure we’ll be fine. I’m sure we’ll get over each other at some point. Years from now, after we’ve already divorced, I’ll see her in some cafe, her webbed toes cushioned in elongated oxfords, and we’ll do the thing where we hurt and then we nod and then I order my latte and walk out like fire. I’ve already left her, so I fill the tub and I smile at the water. It’s new and terrifying and so soft to carry uphill.

       -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 

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

my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.

the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.

                                   - 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 Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.

the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.

in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear,  chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.

he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.

he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”

                                - C. Essington 

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

- c. essington

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

I’m teaching this workshop with another published and accomplished author! We aim to teach what high school and most college students do not learn about writing and publishing their own work. 

Writing Workshop Launch!

We’re excited to announce that Siblíní is hosting a Summer Writing Workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the month of July!

We’re currently accepting applications from high school and college-age students who are interested in learning more about creative writing and publication opportunities. For more information and to apply, please visit our website. 

http://www.siblinijournal.com/#!writing-workshop/o95nw

If able, any reblogging of this opportunity would be immensely appreciated!