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

I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.

I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.

the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.

I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.

it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.

I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.

the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.

the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.

I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.

and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.

- c.essington

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

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claireoleson

9 years ago

Joan of Arc’s Area Code

I have kept the fire on hold for eight months now- the dial tone is burning my left ear into decibels of charcoal.

I have re-recorded my answering message to say that I am out of town (and also newly made of ash and second-story window exits.)

I have slept next to the receiver, receiving, as the blips of flame came at me like candle light.

I know that, on the other side of the spiraling teal cord, there is an orange and a yellow and a red all gnawing through the same heated throat, all of its light just waiting to get to the talking.

But I do not want to start with the hellos or the incinerations; I would like to skip the going down and get right to the coming up for air- as though this were water, as though all the ocean’s burning salts were synonymous to a lit stove.

I want the after photo — the stale, post-noise sound of nothing happening. That saw-tooth quiet coming in like a wave.

I want the lost-conversation hum of the house being suddenly empty and the me being suddenly not on fire —

the phone cradled in a soft, home-dialed, plastic-blue.

- C. Essingotn

Toad-Stomach

a cream-with-mushrooms color; ducked, formless, curtaining an animal that isn’t too much more than a way of moving cold blood in and out of brain. the whole little inch hints at mud and comfort and the paper-thick line between guts and ground.

- c. essington

Tags

writing poem LITTLE

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claireoleson

8 years ago

Prof: You have to write this essay about more than one text, bring the works in discussion with one another.

Me, setting up three books across from one another at a mini dinner table: I got it I got it shhh...

Me, after pouring them all glasses of wine and setting out a nice cheese selection: Talk to each other, guys.

9 notes View Post

claireoleson

7 years ago