Hi Lovely, Again, I Am In Awe Of Your Beautiful Words. I Had A Question Though, If You Don't Mind. Do

- c. essington

“Ham and Starch” a short story by Claire Oleson

Slowly, with her voice pointed down towards the snow, she starts. “That we aren’t for the morning/ that we aren’t for house-fires./ That if you lit a match in your basement/ and it caught on/ and g…

I’ve had a short story published on the literary blog, The Whale.

- c. essington

the sky unclenches a mouth or two —  water trips out of the night  with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.

tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the  rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark. 

the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum. 

no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone  at least seven times 

and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here  only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder. 

                                       - c. essington 

              - C. Essington

Not quite a question--I wasn't sure how else to reach out. I just read your story from Hika: Limbo and Other Party Games? Its been on my shelf for ages, I reached for it by happy accident. Desperate to focus on anything but finals, maybe. Usually I'd start a new paragraph here. Tends to be my style. I'm running out of words though, so: I guess I just wanted to thank you. I hope someday I can learn to lose as beautifully as you have. In the meantime, I've pasted it in my notebook. Hope thats ok.

Agh I love hearing from people at Kenyon and I’m honored that you put it in your notebook, that’s amazing. I hope you can gain beautifully! Your reading and caring about it is so appreciated so thank you as well! I hope your finals go well and you get to the other side in a hug of summer that lets you relax. 

okay but [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith is it

Here’s another couple of photos from my great grandfather Axel’s fishing trip from 1928. 

top 5 favorite books?

Oh gosh. As of right now, and this is heavily based on what I’ve read recently, these are some I really like (in no particular order): 

1. Limber - Angela Pelster

2. Crush and War of the Foxes - Richard Siken (both are poetry books and make me so angry how good they are)

3. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe

4. The Things They carried - Tim O’Brien 

5. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson (any of them, I’m serious) 

Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.

exit music for a sister driving out of state

the wind is crowned in lemongrass as it stumbles from the field, some king that left her throne cold and throbbing — a purpled cheek under a frozen section of steak, the marbled fat of citizens needs veining through a red-velvet muscle.

I breathe in once and hold it, the day and its run-away king at the top of the air, her slipping royalty, the field bright as honey in lamplight or lamplight in honey.

I build a little headache and keep it like an ant under a glass, its sharp frantic body agonizing blackly in the circle of my skull, as if it had a home of sand to crawl back to but my bones kept it from the colony.

this is enough, I’m sure, the king and my thrum of forehead, enough to fill the day to its brim, nothing else could possibly be happening to us. I bow once and the ache follows me down, I think to kneel as a gust trips by, to become knighted and feel the ant itch up to a scarab beetle— scratching the hieroglyph for migraine onto the edges of the over-turned trap of glass and brain.

                  - c. essington