Toad-Stomach

- c. essington

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

Here’s a poetry book review I wrote published by Cleaver magazine. 

sleeping on it

everything about it goes around like a good story which takes a new room on a new tongue every night. I wish I could do the same but I’m not so good at convincing people to give me their time or their teeth or their mornings. 

the idea is that you drop yourself and then recover on waking to find that it all hangs different on the shoulders, is less pink, more amaranth, less the leaves of a turnip flower, more the hollowed chest of a cloud after rain—

go to bed across it, maybe its sheets will muddle into a word, maybe the goose feathers will conspire into a cotton-mouthed dictation, saying ah yes, the breakthrough, the meaning, the good. 

or maybe it’s just the time and how it drags through the dark like the cold body of a fish dragging through a mile of river: just about breathing without meaning to and surviving without intending survival until the thing that almost ate you the night before has starved to death, lost its ribs, its music its importance. or it could be

that you forget after you go under and come up, that if it hurts, it will have a place where it  can stop hurting, and a REM cycle is just a good way to buck the hours  off your nerves, not that it’s particularly curative,  just that it knows how to drown minutes

out of their bodies and yours.

         - c. essington

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.

one gallon of wind skims over us, drying sharply in our nerves like  some font set too large for us to read— I think I can make out the four-way stop of a “t”  unfolding its cold phoneme across my chest. 

                                      - 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

This came a couple days ago, the fourth issue of Bridge Eight, and it’s beautiful and has a story of mine in it and it’s lovely to have a physical copy of.

I work here — it’s been such a rewarding and interesting experience so consider it if you’re interested in publication/ human rights/ language. 

Hi friends! If you’re interested in working for my literary magazine Persephone’s Daughters (dedicated to empowering female abuse survivors), you’re in luck! We’re open for new staff member applications (due on May 10th).

Just fill out the form/application above and you’re good to go!

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 

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.