Half Way Done With College, Home And Safe In The Chlorophylled Center Of Michigan’s Palm, Okay.

              - 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.

Hello

to the new followers. Just broke 600 so, you know, it’s a whole bundle of lovelies. Let me know if you’ve got any questions!

                       - C. Essington

she’s small and made of sodium

(just lil new art o mine)

For the game: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Food: Zucchini bread someone you care about made but burned a little

Location: An empty lighthouse on a cliffside that’s starting to lean out over the tide. 

Thank you. 

Send me a book title in an ask and I’ll reply with a food and a place I think fit with the piece. 

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 

Dried Dates

sitting purple and unkissed on the crests of our lips. is your fish all right tonight or have they drowned it too deep into the cream?

the whole of the night lays soft and creased with sun, like it wasn’t held in the wine we drank but dragged out on the rocks by the shoreline. it feels distant and violet, like a cold bruise or a hickey that you gave to yourself which you can see in the bathroom mirror from the far end of your bedroom. your bedroom, which we keep closed.

even though it’s right here, rounded over tines and tablecloth and third rounds of water. the water which comes on the tongue like it’s been salted by air and muddied with the brine from the bottoms of our shoes that stood on the stoop for so so long.

there is sodium in the lamplight, there is anointing oil shining just behind your irises but you won’t spend it tonight, because we’ve got nothing but dimmest and most practical sugars to bless. besides, the dinner was nice and cost you.

it is not good but it has been soft, the night, the date, I could take it on a hike and know it would not spoil from hours in the heat and sweat of going uphill. we rove around the pit, don’t kiss, and shuck the waxy hide of it on the corners of our “goodnights”

for the sake of health, some people substitute this sort of thing for its betters and broaders and deepers. for the sake of health, you can pit one date and eviscerate it, out of its stretched-globe shape, so it sits only in name and color.

from here, it is pureed with hot water until the mastication of blades yields a warm paste not wholly unlike the first date you had before. this is what you do instead of lofting one white hill of sugar from bag to cup to cake.

this is what you do when you walk away into the damp summer night, ragged with the sharp cuts of car lights, tossed against the plastic edges of being polite for hours.

you take your drenched self home, the whole of you lukewarm and cast into a tepid magenta. 

                                               - C. Essington

Ten Places You Must Visit After You’ve Died

the fence which circles your backyard like a wedding band squeezes tight around the fingers of overgrown grass— no one’s home but the house still spills with voices, somehow. now, if you look out of your left-hand window, you’ll see we’re passing the sahara.

you ought to hire your own sherpa, trusting a company will never do, the crest of everest resembles the corners of your mother’s eyes too much for you to see. you say no thank you and start on down alone.

in a flurry of mortality, you buy a ticket for a cruise trip which happens on a boat just big enough to make you feel like you’re never on a boat— a floating nowhere suspended above the saltwater. the only people crying are children, which is a good sign, it means that things are going largely well and the only things going wrong are happening to lost toys and the bright braids of small girls. it might be good here. you heave last night’s crab over the port side, yes, it’s all good here.

                           - c. essington

For the writing thingy! Lighter, lipstick, Lucky penny, marker, camera. :D

Certainly, thank you.

Inventory:1. Lighter2. Lipstick3. Lucky penny4. Marker5. Camera

Clive roved the blue lipstick over his mouth before leaving, two splinters of periwinkle smirking above his teeth. He’d been letting his hair roar down until it dangled near the same piece of body where his ribs ended. The frays of blonde started getting caught on barbs of his life, one of which was a flick of orange in his sister’s hands that she’d held up too high. His trailing strands got smeared with burning before he smothered the flame and confiscated the lighter. After that, his ribs were abandoned by the black-licked blonde and his hair flew up to perch above his shoulders. 

So he went out, lips blue, hair burnt up to his neck, and his pockets lined with change. The metal discs clinked together, pressing up clouds of lint that gathered like cholesterol under his nails. He’d run his fingertips over the currencies, wearing his thumb down to redness on the edge of a penny and calling the soreness good fortune. When he didn’t have pennies to get his hands blushed on, he’d take out a red crayola marker and draw his own sort of luck across his knuckles. 

Clive kept his lips blue and his hands red and his body out of burning the best he could manage. He’d take a photo of it all in a restaurant bathroom, his eyes lowered into the grain the mirror’s reflection, trying to find the place where his colors met his breath. 

                - C. Essington.

Thank you, this was an interesting list. 

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. 

from here, the metal of the sink trips the bright of the afternoon into one blot of silver  just thick enough  to get dim on.

from here, sleep is below us like a manta ray is below the water. we feel wings, slick and cousined to a shark, slip across our eyes. we fall in and out of ourselves, hands very close to not touching. 

from here, I’ve caught the picture of your eyes closed across the pillow, brain still shadowed, leg twitching  on the rim of a dream. I woke up before you to find the world soft, to find a privacy, the bed dented lightly with the girl of it. 

        - c. essington