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



Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Ashes from Ashes

 
 
we'll get to it, what
this. 
this is a what.
this is a type of
 
a burning. 
a what. i mean. 
it's calling. 
calling what. 
not what. a who. 
you mean. 
 
don't all talk at once. 
it's a calling. 
we'll get to it. 
we are getting closer. 
to what. 
to the beginning. 
 
now what. 
 
let me tell you a story. 
 
 
do you remember the caves we lived in for so many lifetimes. in the before. in the skins and furs of when we spoke the languages of all the living. do you recall the way we read the smoke. the way echoes danced inside us, our heartbeats as wild and free as the sky itself threatening to swallow. i am writing to you from inside the caging of a matrix that was designed to destroy all memory of what we are. how we traded freedom for an empty promise of safe. and there is no safe. there is now less and less safe for all. 
 
once upon a time, we slept in the crook of fear as sweet as any babe because we walked with death, our ancestors held as close as a whisper. do you hear them. do you know it was always just us in the cave. it only holds room enough for one. but from the flames we made shadows of self enough to dance ourselves into a frenzy. we began to believe in the closing down into disparate parts. and also we thought we were the burning. 
 
sleep now, we are almost there. 
 
we have called into the deepest dark, and the only resolution now is extinction. and then return. for there is nowhere to go beyond. the universe is exact and ever expanding, annihilation and ruin.

 

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Dear Poetry, the old brag

Dear Poetry,

for Marthe Reed 
      who I found out an hour after writing this poem had left us earlier in the morning 

on the algorithms that run your life
on the screen shots we fed to discern
on the amount of busy work designed to architect what we call surviving
on the edge of this where I can't even meet
on the teeth marks of blame
on the shame you suckle

if I give you my life
if I give you my wanting never filled
if I give you this trap I keep to cage
I think of what hasn't ever happened
& what has happened
& everything in between

I remember this life and this life
pale of this space as if a word,
as if on the pluck of a word
root me, think much of

and it is an old moon, a rusty car, or a spring in the mattress
or it is the bee box, the dead women, the waterfall in a city
hook in the eye of a gone missing, accident of holy holies,
I am the bomb, I am become the shored missive, I am this water too
a lineage of images hoarded into the sprawl
and it is look: I am crawling out under, it is look: I am crawling

to the lip of the wound
where you promise me light
I am flinging in
who needs poetry
I am not afraid to lose you