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

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 

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.