Snow Moon

New Orleans is a shipwreck masquerading as a city

it hovers, horizon of worn time

i would lay down in fields of warm settings & if the moon

says i need you, cresting the rooftops of abandon 

where we travel to be able to breathe & below sea level still

high enough up & you can see the whole bend in the river

ghost barges stirring up February fog round the edges of their cut paths

call & response from the next roof over, we’re all out here leaving 

something behind, write my name on it for a lifetime, for this life 

folded into you, the way some of us get left out of the picture 

crosses the choice that some of us leave on our own if love

isn’t what you think it is: You’ll never be as free as when 

you let go of all you think you’ve learned here

asphalt shingles held us to a gripping, if you want to be inside me

under that full moon, we need to be high enough 

that i can see my city, the way i tied my life to her

the way i could come up under her, a rushing of water

is where my life spooled out, a rushing of wanting to feel everything 

there are types of desire that undo you, then there are types of wanting 

that carry you far enough to find them— some of us live in the interstices 

knowing all of this is temporary, steal what you can carry  

plunder the rest 

CRUMBS

For those that think they are monstrous, i speak for you

Uncanny we wade, so water a trembling sign for will you

                 uncaring in outcomes but i did want to be shattered 

You can’t have everything and they mean it when you find 

Having traveled far to seek some answers you end up inside the box 

                  Tell me what your wish is, little girl 

We have to suspend belief that beauty can love such horror show

But, birdy, we fly don’t we, when loved, when you get to be one

                  of the lucky ones 

You have to remember we come from this island of misfit 

It’s not like you can just locate New Orleans on a map 

                   inside you there is this breaking that never ends

I thought you could see me in all of this mess, inside this chaos

I fell a victim to this dream, that you spoke the words i choose 

                   Too and listen, little echo, little warbling chest space 

All my life has been less than, and less than that to hold on to

Try to bargain even now, let it be this last time to get it right somehow 

                   that merry go round moving so fast and you think what 

Is real in a movie about our future selves, plastic trinkets pawned to history 

We of the B sides, the news bytes, the recycling data of gossip 

                   Tell me what am i surviving since love is off the table 

Whatever darkness darkens, and i am there. Wherever fate is forgotten, waves

Lap from memory and it is a thing they do, like us continuing, as if we should

                    Time takes us anyway so what matter you chose never to try 

Is it true, if no one wants to hold on to you

You fly away, in one’s city, broken apart, is it true really

                     That you never really cared at all if i was here with you 

        

 

ADDICT

"maybe the people who come to you can handle your darkness"

said someone to me this week. a friend. i say to myself things like

"only broken people come to you, you attract damage"  forget perception

forget we paint the moment we are in with the brush of the past

and it colors everything with what was, not what is

i went to a presentation on healing from sexual trauma

and listened to a room full of women, are you surprised it was

a room full of women but of course we are

my brother was sexually abused and now he is dead

i cry in the bathtub because last week i was having sex

with someone who loves me and who i love but

we can't be together so now i am alone again

it hurts: i go online and in ten minutes find a stranger

to fill that emptiness, fix it: My deepest wound is invisibility

no one can see me and that is how abuse gets in

no one can see me and so too i think of ways to be seen

no matter the cost: i listen to a radio interview with a therapist

on sex addiction and she talks about volition, about whether one

in the moment dissociates and can even make a conscious choice

so tell me how consent works when all i know is other people's bodies

are a way to danger, cloaking what i am worth i seduce abuse b/c i

am in love with the way it consistently wants me back

i don't have to wonder: you love me like you want me dead, you love

me like i'm not real, you love me like i don't exist at all

and yes, i say yes and yes and yes: it's all bloomed inside me

first kiss to fist

dear poetry, effects of why

dear poetry,


turned culprit, awake
in that sight line's murmuration
comma of interruption invaded
caught room of lit rock
my salted evidence runs dispersed notes
darkening sky threat but our faces dry
skirting mud holes on the neutral ground
falling in line, grief has a way of arriving
fully packed on your doorstep & you
throw open your heart, lay down in great
abandon in the arms of love, sweet escape
be my eternal star gazing so i constellate
trauma, nerves carded to my lineage weaved
of careening, i ran out of new language
to stir against, sound of horns carrying us
the way a river flows or fly away, i'll fly
away, i marked memory, the sky
mixed media: white brush strokes amid blue
what is enough in life

Dear Poetry, Now I lay me down

dear poetry,

to poet is less about language and more about sacrifice
to say i will look so you don't have to
at the atrocities of life, the damage of this place
the cruelty, the blatant disregard, the aches the heart breaks against
look, i will peer deeply into the horror and pull back up
underworld of my very sound, hooked skin to lipped tonguing
so be it.

so be it.

make the terror beautiful, it won't hurt
as much when i hand you truth
i have wrapped it in my love, here take it

do we move closer in the gaps
the dead make

we keep believing separate
we keep believing
difference
we keep believing in I vs us vs me vs us vs them

and to poet is to say: wake up
to use your body and your life to say: wake up

every program you've been handed doesn't matter
every code that says suffer, that says less than, that says not enough

to say I would give my life is not to say I will lay down and die for you
to say I would give my life is to say I am here minding the changes
to say I keep coming here, I keep taking on this pain and this hurt and this loss
to say while we are here, let us sing
are you listening?

to walk each other home
quiet and still enough to recall
we are nothing

nothing but vibration
without end

Dear Poetry, Cloak & Dagger

Dear Poetry,

The cup of gratitude is always full and washes away other projections. It is always full. When you talk to the dead, you spend a lot of time examining doubt. Am I my skin or the failure of my skin? I'm looking down a deep well at what I believe is the surface of water but is really emptiness. I have trouble with domestic life. This island is where you get one caress, one caress only. Use it well. A poem is like a peck on the cheek usually until hunger for another's mouth on yours swallows all sense of decency of taste. We are the accident of nature disobeying its own laws. What you show up for every day that no one sees: That is who you are. I have as most do an appetite towards what harms. I think it is suffering that means I love or that I love means I must know suffering. That code keeps us. Here is the secret: When you see me I am loving you. When you read to me I am loving you. When I read you I am loving you. When you are in the room with me I am unconditionally loving you. I am clear channel to open heart seeing you as you step onto the stage, into the shape of the word and what carried you there. I am in there. We are on that field. It is all the same path. Where there is poetry: There is this without condition. That is the bargain I made.

M

My New Book: Commitment from Lavender Ink Press

I have a new collection coming out this month from Lavender Ink. 

Available for ordering now online: 

I'll be at AWP this year debuting this book:

Lavender Ink and Diálogos authors will be featured at two readings at AWP. This one celebrates new releases and is jointly sponsored by Chax Press and will also feature readings by their authors, including Charles Alexander himself. 


On Thursday, April 9 come see and hear:
Marc Vincenz and Tom Bradley reading from This Wasted Land.
Pablo Medina reading from his translation of Virgilio Piñera's The Weight of the Island
Mark Statman reading from That Train Again
Alexis Levitin reading his translation of Santiago Vizcaino's Destruction in the Afternoon, as well Santiago reading from the original
Megan Burns reading from Commitment
Chris Shipman reading from T. Rex Parade
With special appearances by Nancy Dixon (N.O. Lit: 200 Years of New Orleans Literature), Vincent Celluci (Fuck Poems), Michael Tod Edgerton, and likely more....
at
Segue Cafe
609 South 10th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55404

The second event is on Friday night, jointly sponsored by Gold Wake Press. See https://www.facebook.com/events/1617074701839050/
Details here also:
Friday, April 10, 2015
7 - 9 PM
Lavender Ink/Gold Wake Press Reading with Laura Madeline Wiseman, Michael Tod Edgerton, Megan Burns, Chris Shipman, Sara Henning, Kyle McCord, Joshua Butts, Rebecca J.R. Lachman, Erin Elizabeth Smith, and Mary Buchinger Bodwell
The Crooked Pint
501 South Washington Avenue
Minneapolis, MN

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

Poem for August

August

for Laura Mattingly

“there are so many ways to be held prisoner”  -Anne Carson

ribbons of sun

dusky breath over this horizon

shimmering outlines of branches

screened like a mid-day suffering

each breath, reckoned

throats of ash, throats of wander

distant shade a sprinkling

photographs of nude bodies in black

and white, a scrolling of sex

at the fingertip

tipping displays to match grain

to groove, a warren for memory

at the hardest edge: have you gone

blurry        gone unnoticed

scalded faces lap up injustice

what choice do any of us have?

there’s only one path to disclosure

one sure foot graced for escape

we turn over ancient metaphors

a type of joy we solder: why does love

happen? we keep asking

the silent hours

8.17.13

Megan Burns

New From Trembling Pillow Press: SUPER NATURAL

Tracey McTague's SUPER NATURAL is now available from Trembling Pillow Press. 

Also available as an ebook for Kindle. 

Advance Praise for SUPER NATURAL:

“A hornbook for the fledgling seer. A trickster’s bible. Mystic, domestic, ritualistic, caustic. Tracey McTague’s book invokes the spaces between the worlds with poems that demand to be read aloud, incantations against—or for—those liminal places where spirits flap free. With sensual vulgarity and profane beauty, her poems draw close to the divine, stripping language down to its glowing bones. I know this place; it stalks me. And I believe in these poems”

-Lauren Ireland

“Edgar Allen Poe famously wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one begins to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some mysterious way doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still. Similarly, Tracey McTague’s poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding just the right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and spiciness.

It just so happens that Tracey has one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn…I’m not sure whether she has transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or whether the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like enchanted terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown tongue.”

The lines are short and this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite, sound-attentive moments as “prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’ “porch minks,” and “faux pas paw prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria infested” poems gemlike, with their strange and unembarrassed (i.e. uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare them to amber. With her fine and surreal sense of juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is sure to work in insects and delicate mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph detainment center”, a “chocolate mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey [that] yells,

‘Titans – show us your tits’”!

To which one can only respond:

Tracey! Show us your poems!”

-Nada Gordon

Tracey McTague is a “sorceress in sweet depravity/ & general decay.” She calls forth a world crowded with the debris of daily life, lit by “the wide-eyed radiance” of the poet’s mind: Antigone brand condoms and H.R. department emoticons.

These poems brim with wonder, but also warning. They gather global gods and folk rituals, as if the present, or, more precisely, the future, required the resurrection of every possible power — hope here residing not above us but in the ways such prayers access “the primordial wisdom in the world as it is.”

-Allison Cobb

Tracey McTague is a streetwise detective of the most unusual details; some of her poems read like a pile of stuff discovered in an alley -- mysterious, then interesting, then meaningful, beautiful, and rewarding to the careful eye.  Other poems seem channeled from the distant flare of a blinking star; on top of her Brooklyn hill, McTague is a strangely-alloyed antennae picking up eons-old cosmic messages.   My favorite poems are the ones that demand to be reread.  As soon as I finished this book, I started it anew.  

-Shafer Hall

Tracey McTague’s amazing collection of poetry Supernatural, fires up the language. Folklore, nature, and the quotidian meld into bars of gold and silver. These poems dedicated to family and friends, lift off the page and light up poetry’s sky. Grounded in folklore, McTague’s poems can’t be nailed to the wall, they are tricksters, shape shifters that defy our expectations and rules.

-Brenda Coultas 

Delivered with the spontaneous mind of "first thought best thought," each word is also a well wrought amulet stowed in the shelves of the poem. It's their sense of strangeness, vast associative possibility and sonic kinkiness that makes me feel we can use them as chants to combat commonplace wrong-doers. As she writes, "bird-herald appears/making a joyful noise/& always pays your debts."

-Stacy Szymaszek

Review of Michael Ford's Where We Expect to See You Soon

This review first appeared in the literary journal Entrepôt in April, 2012. 

Where We Expect to See You Soon by Michael Ford

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011

Reviewed by Megan Burns

            Often there is a text that haunts the text you’re reading. In the case, of Michael Ford’s Where We Expect to See You Soon, the reader is pointed in the direction of one such haunting in the opening epigraphs. Alice Notley’s line: “we move back into a damaged city” both frames the context of these poems and also signals to the careful reader a subtext for this work in both rhythm and line. I say rhythm and line because I don’t think one can bring to mind Notley at the beginning of a poem sequence without being attuned to her attention to the way a poem moves both in its line and each line in its place in the world of the poem. The epigraph is the first line from a poem “City” from the unpublished collection “Benediction” in Grave of Light (Wesleyan, 2006). The word “city” in the line though immediately reminded me of another chapbook, entitled “City of” by Notley (Rain Taxi, 2005). The two are probably linked in more than language as I read Notley’s chapbook after returning to New Orleans in late 2005 with its prescient lines: “It’s a placid / earth of horror and / from it/ I begin//No nation now/ only a/ city.” Ford, also a New Orleans poet, touches on these same images in the opening poem “The New Atlantis” where we find, “The city was marked— in the atlas as lost—the map of the place.” So, here are two texts wrestling with the city, the loss of the city and the illusion of the city. Each text also is setting down lines with precise rhythmical markers that tell us how to read the line as though we were locating through sound some sense of locale in the breath. Ford’s technique is to use the dash to break up any continuity in the line and to cause the reader to stop short and then begin anew. The line breaks become not the breaks, or smaller breaks when confronted with the eye’s need to traverse the horizontal line separating the sentences. In a sense, the horizon line also holds the text together, stringing through the body of the poem like a life line thrown to the drowning person: Here, if you can follow the path of this, if you can hear the sound of my voice, they seem to signal. Ford’s line breaks as well though signal distress as repeatedly the word “city” is broken amid other words cut in two by the end of the line: “fenc/es, to/day, dig/nity, point/ing, meta/phor. o/ver.” Things are broken; the tempo of the line, if not for the break caused by the dashes, would hurl forward at a rapid pace, especially as the images of what the city is pile up. In the ways that memories of loved ones crowd forward, the city is displaced and in its stead a cacophony of oral and aural images surface to take its place.  The narrator guides us through the ruins: “We make our way by match light—conveyed—on/ light bones and feathers—wings fanned out.” And that’s just the first poem.

Ford tells us in a note at the back of the book that all of the poems are written in a form he calls “89,” where the syllable count in the lines as well as the lines in each stanza adhere to a loose structure based on 8 and 9. This brings us to the second epigraph from Shakespeare: “And in fresh numbers number all your graces.” This isn’t the first time that Ford has used a number constraint to create his poems. The success lies in the all but invisible deployment of the method. Far more obvious than the number form on the poems is Ford’s use of the dash to break up his lines and his use of space to cut the line cleanly and control his rhythm. Take the poem “Lizzie Borden, What’s all the Fuss About?” which begins with the line “This will be my murder ballad—” and then precedes to deliver a poem mimicing both Williams’ variable foot as well as subject matter, only to break off in the next line stating: “These fucking numbers are on every-/ thing.” In light of the author’s note, the double meaning behind such a line is even richer. More interesting to me is always Ford’s deft handling of the movement of the poem, here at once he is able to slow the line down to a crawl like William’s cat foot creeping about and then pick it back up to toss it around.  Ford also has the poet’s eye of taking a seemingly innocuous statement and placing it down amid a sea of chaos, so it suddenly resounds loudly. Take the line: “The river is deep because/ there is so much water in it.” Alone we might find this statement quaint, but in Ford’s hands this is the poem “10 Most Dangerous Places in Space” and we have been led here with this reminder: “We will never meet—in quiet/—in footprints on another globe—We/ will never meet again.” Another connection between Ford and Notley for me is that their poems often chill me to the core, and yet I can’t let go of them. Ford presents us with the familiar just enough out of place so that we can never get comfortable; his poems envelope the terror —root in the “terra incognita.”