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, November 14, 2015

[field map for a living specimen]

4.3.14

by the taste on my lips: this treaty we met splintering before even made whole this nothing carries me like a bi of skin the losing of you came sudden like a flood we cater the space we are made to occupy a strung along vestige/ now this minutiae rounding i would think you could forgive me anything but now you gather up loss like a woolery/ a carding/ cradle this sheeping/ a mewling that feathers me down/ breaking a chirp that rustles, oh dear loneliest of heart spaces i would return a bargain once made against feeling/ traveled lengthwise i had to cut the thick lines of regret/ i had to cut & cut long after the bleeding stopped/ to free a wound/ i couldn't speak like any other mouth that gets stopped up with loss/ how do you wander so far to come up empty handed, a breathful of beauty/ it rubs the gently rocking/ take hold/ take hands i felt before i felt/ how i would table this/ how you can never have all that you desire/ this is how you parcel this is the wedge of sweetness offered you get this small ration/ heart-throat

4.12.14
gathering not chance
this upset of time
where a sudden        untethered
i don't want & want
can't turn it over / some singing
what do you do to a wound that won't close
wander in a dreaming of what is not real
so you go somewhere like anyone might
to die alone: grief like a sobering
grief like the echo to this line
now a sistering means to hold the hollow of where you were


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undo the father
a taken back referral
not specific but this archetype
how family breaks against us
the grain edged
until none & then
a wander lonely as in a dream
where you can identify only strangers
in a fabricated geography where want
was the tangible realness



for with children
in some ways once you say
it it is a truth
the parent's ability to structure
a whole lifetime
we know nothing about words
though all our trade was done in them


"More mundanely it was she [U. Zurn] as we read in a letter by Bellmer from Berlin dated 8.7.1954 who had the duty of typing up the manuscripts" -Malcolm Green, Intro to Hans Bellmer's The Doll

Oscar Kokoscha 1920s painter
famous doll made as a surrogate for his lost love

Freud's The Uncanny




Sunday, November 08, 2015

[field map for a living specimen]

4.15.12-4.16.12 (Brooklyn, New York)


"He maps himself in it it? How? In so far as he isolates the function of the mask and plays with it. [Man] in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze." -Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis


one does not [  ] cease playing a role simply, because one has begun to understand it. - James Baldwin

object: central complex for the collision - to interpret alone or in a group at the rate at which outside of the mind determines & begins to order the external opinions/ cut down & formed by the first impression then whittled away by every further subsequent thought

body-in-pieces/ body without pieces

the internal rearrangement presupposed for external structure
dolled in extensions [multiple mimicry]
divided into quartered facial contortions
cracked reflected
vetted in the Artic colded hard
fronted as laughter's last result   last resort: retreat
vacation rental culled that spring
line/rhyme
overt violence gives us the excuse
of not thinking too hard
or does it help encapsulate
what moves/ what helps keep the cage's bars holding --
attack-- resistance of normative playback [first break] from initial solid view
[who breaks rank]
contrast to what/  sonorous rhythm should do --absence of resolution





tangled in the trespass place/ a line not knotted/ studied as sinister/ studied as wood rot/ penciled in blue, not one but two/ & eyed up along avenues/ as if explanation in its winged deference/ give me a dressing down/ a measured glance I could copy/ out a faceless gutter/ gutter's great & plentiful/ sloppy catalogues/ of how to track a tortoise's back

terrible in our moments of most unabashed human/ trotted out show pony amid founts/ of breathing abyss: the colonade where peeked summer's crept up by degrees & we lay spent among asters & day lillies, mouth crammed with dandelion stems

crammed aghast in beauty's last footfall the drip drop my little bird's chatter it's the morning's swerve as it creaks its way downhill each crunchy step; to falter bunches of rammed revolvers each caliber is its shot face explosions of petals that are falling about, its existing & its absolute a(versions) / rounded about as invisible exotics roasted & crannied nooks brumbled/ broached in the vernal absolute -- oh hosta of exacting -- so clovered in the maw's juice/ junction
quartered in the rules/ ruling class that lined up like stacks of cards/ crossed hairs/ crosswise


 NOTE: Yogasana 118 3rd Ave at Wycoff/ St. Mark's 6PM 5:30 (aside: where I do yoga with Nicole Peyrafitte and Pierre Joris while in Brooklyn)

wandering about the frenetic runs to be a flattened response- face first in fist fulls- awash in the grumbling the season's laterst equation- I think that last bit has a falling off remembrance- the way a city is a bitten back, chomped sway
alerted to the block's exact dimensions how to cut about the corners sliced sliced spirals for an easy tabling    trapped in the imaginary mask that you walk about in if the reality is less than satisfying- less tan even in the adding up so over hours & afternoons the last bits became unglued -- prodded as the latest embers flamed up in their little red open mouths- shouting obscene & then fllickering each winking eye