Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

Visit New Orleans Poetry Fest for the annual 4 day poetry festival directed by Bill Lavender and Megan Burns.

Megan Burns' Poeticsofbone&city project on Tumblr



Saturday, June 15, 2013

Fathers: A Breaking Gesture


Goodnight, Moon

when a woman disappears
it’s a permanent stake
under night, this sky, bodies in a slipping
what you wrote: a secret is a way
of pulling a person apart
pour in like a poison, you feed it
poor excuse, a just score
a domestic failing
pulled force abutting angles
so we dropped a degree of fencing
made adjustments in parallel confines
braided down this writ
this work of medium thumbprints
I put palms to each side of your sweet
face & pretend to be of a gentler nature
absconded, a beauty of break, do you
know what a parade is for?
it’s a way of walking around grief
about in dressing down
a nimble prosthetic footprint
try to rendezvous this lesser
try not death comes like a desert
you my most thirsty, I was coming along
remember once the children huddle
three a bed where we lullaby
and they ask questions I have no answers
mother is a new “never-was”
if he wants a bed time story
tell him I have no feeling for you



Copyright    Megan Burns
5.30.13

Friday, June 07, 2013

Wrist & Hoof: Poem for another year in


Wrist & Hoof
-for Desiree Dellagiacomo 6/4/13

love is a type of drifting
there will always be a doubting
imagine this is how you grow older
how the world wonders
don’t you remember this is a place
built on disappearing no stable landing
what are you supposed to do
besides what you have to
think about how hot a fire
must be to burn on water
I know how to construct such
tinder-hearted we live before we die
simple bargains now a dusking
I think there’s fear
there’s a fear & eventual
writing against the content of our content
let’s talk about how the heart changes form
over time through people
let’s talk about its opening & closing
the way it can never be stopped but how we clutch
this is how we carry/ this is how we buck & spar
I have come to consider futility
the heart & its want/ desire & defense/
speak and break speech
a raining down of what we hold hard
against us, once you are strong
you can never not be/ the unbreakable
source of language is chary of cohesion
any animal loves attention
runs from danger/ can’t always see it coming
these are matters of form
poetry is a type of canoeing
in a small lake
love is a bare question
it scatters, the best trick is believing
the world wanted you, we row
out uncompassed cramming up the dead
mouths, this: no end of lettering 




Copyright: Megan Burns 

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Day 29: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

this one
this one
this one
this one
this one
                                                            Here is a neat problem in poetic logic: if the Dactyl Cyllenius is an alias of Hercules, and Hercules is the thumb, and Titias is the fool's finger, it should be possible to find in the myth of Hercules and Titias the name of the intervening finger, the forefinger, to complete the triad used in the Phrygian blessing.

once you vivisect that best laid
you picture this anatomy a dangling at best
this is not really happening

                                                           Paulus considered. 'I am rather rusty on mythology, my dear Theophilus, but I seem to remember that it is made of the bones of Pelops.' 

so you girl a dragon fire
time yourself so the endings come
each begins & then all storied in the last

                                                           The king is being warned of his ritual death. A Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his passport to Paradise. 


when are you 
when are you gonna change
when you change 

                                                         In mediaeval times a garland of periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. 


say you are the stories you recall
say you lean in to the where you walked
say you were invisible but then no, you said, no to that


let them bleed





Open Art Salon tonight at 1501 St. Roch

Please join us June 6, 8PM for a poetry reading at the open art salon at 1501 St. Roch Ave. featuring Brad Richard, Chris Tonelli and Megan Burns followed by an open mic. 

Food and Drink, please feel free to bring something. 

Brad Richard's Motion Studies won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works. He is also the author of the collection Habitations (Portals Press, New Orleans, 2000) and the limited edition chapbook The Men in the Dark (Lowlands Press, Stuttgart, Germany, 2004). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and poetry winner in the Poets & Writers' 2002 Writers Exchange competition, he is chair of creative writing at Lusher Charter High school in New Orleans.

Chris Tonelli is one of the founding editors of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He also founded and curates the So and So Series and edits the So and So Magazine. He is the author of four chapbooks, most recently No Theater (Brave Men Press) and For People Who Like Gravity and Other People (Rope-A-Dope Press), and his first full-length collection is The Trees Around (Birds, LLC). New work can be found in or is forthcoming from jubilat, Fou, La Fovea, and Leveler. He works at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife, Allison, and their two kids, Miles and Vera.

Megan Burns edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has two books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008) and Sound and Basin (2013) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press, 2012) and a city/ bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her chapbook Dollbaby is forthcoming from Horseless Press. Her 30 Days of Weezy project is annotated over at Rap Genius.