I Wake Up In My Wetsuit As The Dark Wakes Up In Its Cold— Some Things Are Like This, As Unavoidable

Creon Tells Antigone To Keep Her Arms At Her Sides When She Runs

Before the rope stippled with green pages of lichen is tied by hands, by mind, on purpose — Before the unburied brother with his chest surrendered to the wind, heart as still as a stone sunk to river-bottom — Before the girl tore off her name, swallowed it like a sword, and cursed her sister to live a lovely life, Creon sat with the blade-eater  in the clutch of a marble chamber and talked to her in the dim slip of evening, backstage.

The chorus ran their tongues over a grooved government, lapping at stone for honey, while Antigone, with her pitch-dark hands, smoothed her  skirt into an eddy. 

Creon tells her it’s a nice knot, that she knows how to tie, she says she’s a sailor, her eyes fixed forward toward the barred wall, moonlight coming in like piano keys, she plays at the strands of string in the rope.

She says she’s a sailor, that she can always feel the water, that she feels it now, how it curves  around her brother’s aorta as a courtesy, but will soon lend it to coral polyps shaped like loveliness, as the water always does.

His hand slides over the cold bench towards her crossed legs. In her head she covers his thumb with six-feet of soil. She holds the rope tighter, tracing the strands, feels her father’s tongue somewhere between wires, then bites it between two fingernails. The hand moves back.

When you run, he says, his eyes on the music of the iron bars, When you run, after you puppet yourself on this ceiling and leave two fingers of air between your neck and the world,  do not let your elbows leak up passed your waist — it would only make your shoulders look tight, like your dad’s.

He had tight shoulders? she asks, her voice slipping under a loud question from the chorus, yes, Creon agrees with himself, tight shoulders and a mole on his clavicle, tight shoulders, among other things.

                                                    - C. Essington

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!

Weird art time sorry. 

but what if it were

nice/ honeyed/ came with its own heart/ already done up in light blue muslin and set to music, wait, the right music.

and what if it 

didn’t hurt (too much)/ came soft in places like the sky comes whole/ and looked like cream and felt like it too and worked like it too. 

and what if

a pulse doesn’t have to feel like a punchline that keeps getting told without a joke to explain it/ (get it, get it, get it)/ and a life doesn’t have to feel like a pressure/ and your head doesn’t always have to be the thing that starts you and ends you and is you. 

                                         - c. essington 

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson • Cleaver Magazine

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT by Melody S. Gee Cooper Dillon, 55 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson - Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives.

This is a review I wrote of Melody Gee's poetry collection "The Dead in Daylight" which is now up on Cleaver magazine's blog.

- c. essington

the fire going down until its just  loose heat and fruit, the quick lisps of faces caught at its edges, those missed-stitches of expression, the looping sugars of eye-contact swimming softly, breathing glow.

this poem is made from rainwater collected outside my dead uncle’s house

my dead uncle’s house gleams like a sore bone

a neighbor’s dog could have brought in, slicked with saliva and dedication.

the more-chip-than-paint walls stand skinned by the storm

that sawed through this county no more than two half-hours ago.

my dead uncle adjusts his death into the still-dying/ still-living cells

that hum on inside him without understanding. parts of him glimmer,

still bright, his hair growing like something shocking

that doesn’t know its shock— the silent video of those years-ago fireworks

pasted to the limp tongue of an elderly VHS tape, its fire

broken, vivid but mute, the cheers I know are there stuck in the air—

like the dark sticks to the night— I can’t see either. all those blank

shouts careening through the screen without their bodies or mine. my dead uncle’s hair

grows down to his knees, no one whispers the secret of his new reality to his follicles

so they all just go on spinning straw-colored beer-calories

into gold. I am outside the house and its long sore silence

which bends the water off its arthritic boards like an old victory I never fought for.

he was not a good uncle. it is july or it was about an hour ago. here is my uncle’s house

I am outside of it, trying to think up something new to call the place that doesn’t belong

to anyone anymore except maybe to those blond locks buttered across the floor like light.

I stand under the gutter and hit it with a stick. old rain,

which sat still long enough to lose its name, hits me cold.

I say hello, think about the hurt of throats in the old video from the picnic on the 4th,

how happy everything must be from behind the camera lens. my uncle doesn’t know he’s dead

like the cold in the gutter doesn’t know its name isn’t thunder any longer.    

                        - c. essington

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 

your writing is honestly amazing you have a lot of talent wow

Thank you so much for taking a look, I really appreciate it. Having people who care about words make it all worth while.