Okay But [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith Is It

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 

- c. essington

So I’ve been scrounging through this old room in our house we just label the “antique room” and I usually leave it alone. But today I found these old photos from 1928 of my great grandfather Axel on a fishing trip “out west”. 

I wrote some tiny casual poetry and can only hope that Axel, in all of your current nonexistence, you can find it in that twisted shadowed grin to forgive my lingual ramblings. 

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.

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. 

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 

Downstream

five fingers stop for the night on a collarbone — pausing like rainwater, the tips pool, and, as round as worlds, they rest like dewdrops. just like dew drops.

dappling over the calcium, the five lucid puddles piano at my skin. the music tunnels inward, bodiless with silence, ghosting sixteenth notes into my synapses.

the weight is liquid, the pressing seeps, I look down through each separate clot of skin and river and see a crush of orange leaves sinking into my chest.

I circle the wrist and uproot its pouring. the feeling prickles off me the same way a boiling pot loses teeth when tugged off the stove.

                               - C. Essington

Writing game: How about a phone number scribbled on a bit of paper, two dollars in change, a pen, a receipt for a restaurant, and a pack of cigarettes?

Sure thing, thank you. 

Inventory:1. A phone number scribbled on bit of paper2. Two dollars in change3. A pen4. A receipt for a restaurant 5. A pack of cigarettes

There is a piece of paper in my pocket, folded twice over, like pigeon’s wings, or my tongue in a fight, or how I sleep when I’m sad. It’s white with black print and it says that I should be full by now. There’s also receipt from my dinner. After eating through six truffle mushrooms curled in oil and laid over pasta, I left with some coins in my pocket and not much else, my mouth ringing with salt and linguini and fungi I can’t afford but swallowed anyway. 

I’m not full yet despite the seven digits that sit like a brand by my left thigh, so I take out ink and cross them into black hashes. There is being bloated and there is being starving and I’d rather fit in one of those places than be left alone in the middle, a stranger’s affection listed to me in numbers. 

I light something and watch it dwindle, a white column of paper singing in orange and going grey. I think that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing too. It’s not great, I’m still hungry and aching and made of willow leaves and molars, but I can stand upright in my name and store my grievances on the dark sides of my quarters and breathe like I love it, but don’t really have a reason for it all the time.  

           - C. Essington

Thank you for this and your support,

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. 

The Kiss - c. essington   (After Gustav Klimt) 

               someone spent too much time on something. 

Icing The Bruise

and we pressed the water till it gave way to bone and marble— you, with your voice coated in pond scum, say that muscle must be some afterthought of river and history. even if it’s only a statue’s legs and hurt, there is still a blood to stone if it’s  set up as a body.

empathy kicks up like a reflex the size of a carbuncle buried in the side of kneecap. 

we go into the forest and lay palms on a riverbed of clay, pushing as if on the chest of someone breathless;

there is a heart to this somewhere— and it can be called up from the sleep of the day like some story where Tiresias keeps his eyes open the whole time and doesn’t tell anyone why.