LAST POEM

Because I want you to see me as I take myself apart. 

-R. Froude, Your Love Alone is Not Enough

LAST POEM 

for dave

here is the root of it

[_____pulled up

it took me over 5 years

to be able to shape the sound 

of it _____]

i gave you the best parts of me

we gave the world the best parts of us

we made together the best parts of us

we gave to one another the best parts

pulled 3x from my body

i gave you the best parts of me

portal of my body, between us we made sacred

outside any poem we wrote, we made beauty 

beyond telling, the heart of it

nothing existed before we poured 

into one another all we took for granted

& all of the light & what we thought of 

was love               was love

& you hated me

words collected like knives

we destroyed all of it 

you wanted me to die

that body that pooled life 

you wanted it to not exist

to douse, to eradicate, to allow 

to slip away, you hated each part 

as if it is possible 

to be both the best...

it is possible 

to be the best & the worst

collision of my life 

closed circle: i gave you the best parts of me 

that is what islands us (me) 

where no one can reach

& i could not open to feel ever 

again in the not safe 

cave of plenty, you rolled a rock in front

of the entrance 

&

the wilderness 

of things 

she sings inside the darkness

    i hear her even now 

                                   i whisper to her: escape, rescue, abandon

she mirrors back to me:   

                                    all of your wor(l)ds hold no meaning 

New Dollbaby Piece up at Jacket2: EXTREME TEXTS

From:

 Extreme texts

Edited by Divya Victor

Dollbaby

The poetics of hysteria and motherhood

MEGAN BURNS

Trigger warning: abuse, suicide

The following document is an archive of two years of my life when I lost custody of my children after I tried to end an abusive marriage. The court took my kids from me based on the art I create: appropriately, the art in this case centers around historical instances when real women also lost their voices, autonomy, and their lives due to their own inability to have freedom and safety in this world. It’s 2019, and women are still not safe. I want to send the song of this text into the future until the answer is sure: when are women going to be safe in this world?

Read full piece at Jacket2:

http://jacket2.org/poems/dollbaby

Countdown: A Series of Divorcing (Beginnings & Endings)

I started keeping a journal shortly after my husband of 10 years moved out in February of 2013. I wanted him to go, was surprised he agreed to leave, and knew as he had so often threatened me that the backlash would be nearly fatal to me. I thought if I can survive this, if I can be here in the moments and process this as it is happening, maybe I can emerge whole. These are the things we tell ourselves when there is nothing but unknown and fear.

Here is how it begins on March 17, 2013: 

"I don't want to feel anymore today
and prefer the symbolic world. 
I have been living poems for so long I'm only
a figure and I'm glad. "    -Alice Notley, Culture of One


I would like to think poetry brought us together, that it was something we did well like making three amazing human beings. But I think too, we hid there. We imagined because of it, we were something else. We lived in words and not in the space between us. When we talked, we talked too much about too many things and never just sat with feeling. I wonder too, if the erratic, unstable behavior I see more clearly in the last year separated from him is the stuff I chalked up to being eccentric, to being a poet. I mean, when you are at home with the kids and he doesn't show up till 4am drunk after a reading. That's normal right? That's what poets do. When the control and passion blind everything, financial sense and responsibilities, well that's just him being a poet. But I was a poet too, and I was never afforded the same generosity. His poetry allowed him to be irresponsible, flighty, crazy, and undependable. My poetry allowed me to pick up the pieces, to hold it together, to steal time to write in between pregnancies and babies. His writing was a given, from the largest room in the house that was his "office and library" to the second floor porch where I was not to disturb him to his late night bar hopping where he talked poetry till the wee hours with other poets, mostly single, males who didn't have 3 children and a wife at home.

 March 17, 2013: 

There's no way to tell a stone it's a stone, to tell water to be less. A woman too can only be so much in world always at war against her. There's fighting and then there's fighting for your life. 

 March 19, 2013:
... the breaking I will admit to, I said to someone: this life is overwhelming and all the emotions. handle what you can handle. make and make and poetry. always the poetry. these lines that draw and draw us.


I met Dave at the Faulkner Literary Festival in 2000. He was married and I was in a relationship with someone. He came to a reading I gave and shortly after I attended a workshop he held in poetry with the New Orleans School for Imagination. I remember the first time I went to his house and saw his extensive library. I thought I could spend my life with someone who had this many books because I would never run out of things to read. I knew nothing about love or marriage. I barely knew myself. I was 23.

Being married to a poet made me a better poet especially in the beginning. Dave was supportive, he was enthusiastic, he knew who I was talking about, who I should read and why. He knew tons of poets and taught me how to host readings, how to put on events, how to make broadsides, how to make magazines, how to read deeply, how to write harder. I was bought and sold on the mystery of what it was to be a poetry couple. In 2001, Dave handed me Bernadette Mayer's unpublished MS Ethics of Sleep and said you are going to publish this. It took nearly ten years later, but I did. I told him I wanted to publish books and he opened the door to that. I did the work though; I laid out that manuscript while the baby played at my feet. Just like I got a MFA while taking care of 2 kids and rebuilding after Katrina. I always did the work, but it always felt like so much of the work was Dave's work. The patriarchal standards that divide the world were just as sharp in the poetry world. Dave was ten years older, so I could never catch up. And the gap became a widening point of contention as the shine of him being the teacher wore off and I wanted to just be a poet in the world. Not a poet-partner, not a wife-poet, not a student- poet, not the person who fulfilled the ideas and made the practical happen.

March 23, 2013: 

I found completing most things impossible. how to be better plugged in, how to not war ourselves to death, after the fact--we were still addicted to the wreckage. 

In May of 2013, Dave petitioned to gain sole custody of our children. He told the courts I was an unfit mother who endangered the children's lives. For as long as I live, I don't know if I will ever be able to forgive this. I remember the day the children were supposed to come home. I hadn't seen them in 3 days and Dave texted me to tell me he had decided I couldn't see them. He wouldn't let me see or talk to them for 5 days until the judge saw us and decided to grant me supervised visitation pending an evaluation. I had to prove I wasn't the lies that he had made up. And as usual, he didn't have to do anything. The kind of man or husband or father he was was never put on trial. Being a woman means you are already guilty, in the face of money and privilege, you have to prove you are a fit mother even if you have always been one, based simply on the word of a man.

June 21, 2013 

I had to expand big enough to fill my life, it was no longer an option to be brief, to be fitted. The fatal couple is an unending/ what do they want? the world to bend & bend. I could run or I could write, either way you have to push the emotion out as Sartre says, we engage the abyss. We go under b/c we enjoy going under: the loss of self in another. How much can you take me away from this moment? 



Oct 1, 2013:

Dear Other: 
of everything written & said between us, we were never able to find the right language. 
This unique, atypical 
perfect failing 
is us. 

Error: A Seasonal Poem on Breaking

“Error

 And its emotions.

 On the brink of error is a condition of fear.”

 -Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most”

I.

sometimes an error occurs

because of the way the world is fed to us

like X-mas eve, putting together toys for 3 little dreamers

and you looked at me frustrated and called me a “slut”

& I sat in the space of that breaking

knowing how I wifed against a border of neglect

but you led a different life beyond the fencing of home

gingerbreaded, a snow dropping

if you say so, you can make believe

II.

as if a vow could be a way of altering

you double: live your life & write it out

it meters enough edge to trim the lies

III.

failure is just before you begin again

it precedes where you see how you

put yourself back together

I forgot the smell of you

I forgot the taste of you

I forgot any way home realizing survival

is how we maintained this artfulness

IV.

this essay of splinters

supple like causation

wide open, you watch for an all clear sign

the heart, safe for handling

to be hereditary to it is not a choice

that poem backs out, a deep spill

now too, I could not arrange the words

in better orders

V.

a half-finished sentence

I spent a lot of time saying

I love you as a way of warding

a parting

VI.

each little girl I see tears a fresh hole

in me, is this

what love is?

what is not quite

what is false that we can hold

what is made peace with a stalling

Carson says the language of the unsaid

is a two-way traffic

sometimes you travel both

VII.

he said, were you with you someone who made you

happy so little, and I stopped him

and said, I was with someone

who never made me happy

but these errors too

are a type of retelling

we don’t always have to be who we were

VIII.

I lost my life in you, not love

not nothing that was never there

a field where no one meets you

a lover is a smashing process where pieces

of you disintegrate

you don’t recognize disappearance for what it is

what do we mean by necessity?       not enough

is what we mean      not enough

a film burning where the sun

touched it