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.

"This Place" "fault tree": A way of mapping source

you tell someone suspect, someone

yr not sure you want to tell

you become infinitely

(you will infinitely tell, there's no escape from the infinite)

responsible not only for the telling but for the translation

of that situation's speechmaking

                                          (fault tree   26) 

Here in this space, a rectangling, is a construction of how we mark time. Once there was a doubling, look where I wrote on February, 5, 2013: "you don't get happiness, you don't get it, what you do is learn to be still & swallow it down, you can make the unmake" 

This place    not belonging not mine not

                                         ("This place")

Here in this time: when the calendar called we operated, we dogged the ear to mark, so love too is a formula, you can never know a person, and you can forget this over and over. What I wrote on February, 18, 2013: "tried to make a space safe for all of you but couldn't    failed in that measure/ barter this miserable moment for all the lifetimes/ for all lifetimes/ I've had more love than most" 

i want to know about the war in yr time

what you did

                                         (fault tree  35)

Circling as it does, one comes back upon loss, it comes back up this surface side against water, we never were far from drowning. February 18, 2013: "how a house does not make a home even when you rebuild it from the ground up, exactly, a memorial of what we had overcome & thinking we had weathered enough storms" 

just acclimating    rendering syllables

on tongues etching landscape onto brain

                                          ("Driving")

Roots deep this city a way of imprint as clear as my name, you can't know this or not know me, this constancy sweeps truth, sweeps false, sweeps the ashes of what burned fastest: February, 24, 2013: "no talk of where love gets you when all you get is survival, from means to means/ the heart is another matter/ filed away years of what we said or didn't"

as some people do, ones of us more actively

than others of us but all to the same end

we are betrothed

                                       (fault tree    40)

Distance changes the tone: the sound of a thing reverberating, the heart's echo, the underwater silence that is not silent, once upon a time is an amorous place: (March 5, 2013) "talked till there was no other narrative erased in the long stream of how you kept me/ so no one can walk away or be a different person/ how could i believe there was any other than your catalogue/ in the end began to see there was never any thing resembling love/ there:  a mirroring or just some shattered phase/ all that was required was an owning" 

no names for this

for touch of leaf

no name for trade wind

nor stomach churn

                           ("Dictation") 

Travel ground in what you fear and sneak wonder, awash in the wave's descent. What can you handle? What is unspoken that you keep down, but can't keep quiet? (March 12, 2013) "I would walk fire of fires for them, mothering dragons/ my flame scarred right. spilled 3x a bellyful, bright red. I pull out of the ash my cindered heart's space/ nothing can burn twice/ fires the fire I fear not" 

so if one spewed of hate

one built hate

and if another spewed of immobility

one was static

                            (fault tree   47)

March 26, 2013: "tried not to disappear under the wounding of failure/ not parent enough/ not mother enough/ to give over a decade but for it never to be enough/ you can't ever sacrifice enough, if mother--you can't ever risk being a real person-- each night I was away from you I waded in the guilt of it/ convinced time takes care of everything. what it really does is make us other people."

limbs long and light   the water carries me

in it I am endless I am a finite thing

cells exchanging one for another

brain bumping against bone

against tissue against water

                         ("The Pacific")

April 23, 2013: "how do you navigate a breaking/ what could we have done better/ I can see the etching on your heart/ these days we will recall/ we all have these days/ they come uncounted/ what you do is collect joy, the people who love you --in fact, all the love is a collecting, you can never predict where it comes from and in what doses, you choose what you can choose, other than that, trying to survive." 

May 20, 2013: "you flaw down your life, find faults that sound your face/ this decade he took & took till all was just confusion, so sane, I thought I knew the words inside my head, thought I was the one telling the story, eclipsed forgot the way to stand/ forgot the way to end when something's over, some payment for my lack/ a mother has no way to keep him out/ there is no thing on this earth that will keep me from them" 

Author Note: This is a poem created to be read as a poem and not to be used in a court of law. I used kathryn pringle's fault tree (Omnidawn Press, 2012) and Megan Kaminski's This Place (Dusie Kollectiv, 2013) to create this piece. Both poets stayed with me between May 22 and May 23, 2013. 

Mother's Day

when things are good is the last moment
before they are not
a city is a place of falling bullets
Mother's Day: 19 down
do you believe you come from here
rooted to violence
does it grow inside of you like desperation
a hole never full
love is a poor way for patching
it never solids, it weighs heavy, breaks brittle
it's no way to skate surface
rough over
my heart rode down, rides blocks and blocks
how many times I've swallowed another
saying, I came here & fell in love
my city/ where I wondered
what do you see
I choked down knowing I would never leave
wedded to a broken
I never loved more, any morning is a wailing
what I know of loss/ how cement holds bodies
how fear is a way of navigating
a never never land we never grew
-- swerved round where the river turns, but never turns against you
mimic what it means to be a city
when we buried you alive, it was delicate
it was slipcover: we dirted over you
to keep you safe
tell me how a mother dangles
tell me of that dripping, here in New Orleans
we know danger, hardly know anything
is anymore/ we live deep under the nation
we live in this holy, holy lights turned out
eating darkness like a fruiting
how you lean into a city for a lifetime
love like an eruption, love like a scouring
guess who knows how to operate the city
guess what kind of naming I like best
we learn about love from losing
don't you ever forget that
don't you ever try to be more than you are
if you think mother is a type of anchor
watch how we come up against the rocks

RapGenius on the 30 Days of Weezy Project

The great people over at Rap Genius have published all 30 of the poems from the 30 Days of Weezy Project on their site, and I am slowly annotating them along with some help from my poetry collaborators, Geoff Munsterman and Gina Myers. 

They are calling the Weezy poems: "An Epic Poem for our Times" 

*Love*

You can see all the annotations under my album.

This is as close I will probably ever get to being a rap star. 

Poetry Genius also has a nice blog post about the project focusing on the collaborations as well.

It begins:

 For National Poetry Month last April, New Orleans writer Megan Burns set out on a mission to write 30 poems in 30 days, all about Lil Wayne. Mission accomplished! In a truly Rap Genius-esque collaborative effort, Burns partnered with fellow authors Gina Myers and Geoff Munsterman to complete 30 Days of Weezy—and now all 30 poems are on the site with killer Verified annotations!

Burns kicks off Day 1 of the series with an “epistolary response” to a Lil Wayne quote about how some women have “deep and dark” reasons for not being able to love.

Full Blog Post

Weezy and I thank you for all the love, Rap Genius and Poetry Genius!

Day 30: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Photo by Gina Myers

(Collaboration with Megan Burns and Gina Myers, Atlanta)



"chest...caved in, mess on the pavement"
-Lil Wayne

Dear Weezy:

outlined this blue, a world of debt accrued
turning every day into something worthy
& new, blacklisted I bite down on
a slipping beat. Chew on that [for
a bit] ashy-mouth shapes form a gesture
in thrown shades.
My shadow tattooed to the sidewalk
iced or blown, a specific song for any
outlands, a specific object for best
intentions, like a chasing--
blazed down a path, a satellite
of pretensions, an art of mistakes
and the mistaken, rapt gaze caught
on the link joining the last hook to the break.
[Take it all down.] Restart the tape
till shuttering a slammed down solution gutters
down the page. This the new sound,
the future splintered, it's grappling a precise
measure tamped down to its tight lip.

Love,
Megan Burns & Gina Myers

Day 28: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"there goes that monster" 

 -Lil Wayne

Beauty Selections

slumped outstare a moaning, this gristle torn 

put song under black wing, a typical cutting

look mama, a roaring

What I said was I hardly know you anymore

almost seated camera side, glanced

that myth: you ate it up & again

how do you let go of someone

who falls into you

urgent urgent this morning's whirr

case studies of girls who seize 

who pose the pretty laced set

take it this dollar bill

the boy has a name for everything

the knots, the loops

a just imagined below the surface

ruined decay of where we break apart

the way water crushes you as you go deeper

the way your own body turns against you

as you rise : a calling in separate tongues

Day 27: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

desire as the trade 

of what you move around in

beyond an eliciting of words

say you keep the loss of where you thought

a half of what you meant to say

I remember you from the first moment we met

it happens and then it happens again

some bodies beyond the touch of trespass

this recording captures the slip

stumbled forward to press this time a bit short

you always pull away and the scene clips

I didn't know the name of the game we played

stolen back along water where we watched till no sun

once we were and this life is tethered to regret

tried wishing that arc of your life crossed closer

not broken lighted across these doorways

the last time we walked away from the levee

there was no looking back

let it rise as it rises

let the black night stay closer to you

than I will ever muster

"gave up on love

fucking with those heartbeakers" 

 -N. Minaj

Day 26: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"No air stirs, but the music steeps the center --

It is not the sea, but what floats over it." 

- Louis Zukofsky [A-2]

An Other Song

The boys are exiled and generous. The boys have fallen and there is no ignoble gesture too paltry to sweep the errors. The boy is a phantasm of where the parting began fresh as a daisy then dirtied clouds of aphorisms. This boy turns outward in a company constantly or all arts the wind blows. Like and unlike, this one is a manufacturer; he unwalled porticoes in a child's shoring scale of colors. Like everything in America, the boy holds centuries of barbarism in his skin. Then the boy is an executive asset, a simple and smooth machine that cannot doubt nor quite muster indifference. Feed and be fat for no reason at all, this boy keeps a lock down on language, this boy is unaware of the deftness of magpies. "He hath a legion of angels." But don't wonder what martyrs our own offices have futured in a yesterday ceremony: for the next ten thousand years, imagine this book a standard equal to mastery, equine to the flatlands. 

Day 25: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Amends

it was all I could hear any longer

the concept of gesture

the concept of civility

this concept of generalizations: can I 

be a certain kind of celebrated?

came home to a dark but not long 

and never lonely this way of travel

to make an anomaly

you must begin anomalous

can't help wanting to be rescued

I was programmed that way

a distinction in belief if you believe the world

can hold you or it can't

you get all the tries to get it right

until trying is a face of failure

you can't complete

can I be a less than 

culpable story repeated till 

fumbling all day so beauty

shatters the points receding

Day 24: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"I came from there and I promise you do not want to go there." -Lil Wayne



New Orleans


suicidal doors a walkabout in dissarray
some cities come higher or better leveled
this haphazard warrants deathing & decrees its last
surrender, ward to a warding off collected bits
of oracles so the winds blow right or neither
this lessened wishful thinking: rotations
record spins, a storm's caress in repetition
taught the game new syntax for color
models in constraints, for money
you spit tracked back over barricades
through borders, skeins of barnacled
ropes tied sternside for unraveling
boys in their smallest faces
taking their bodies out into the sun
did you ever doubt in your radical
dreaming that all that everything
was just within hand's grasp
and still so much would stay
irretrievably the same

Day 23: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"the writer you are in relation to the deaths you have experienced..." -Lil Wayne


"a moment of terror/ happening every day she/ every day forgets." -Anne Carson



A Project


fielded children in the wayside, a gathering so they squared brick by brick
a city is a drumming, where you congregate, where you push back
& here, a culture slips streeted beats, it is irreverent, then too the martyrdom
of being skinned & of being gendered & of being bodied in a place
that crumbles, in the ruins where we built up from disaster
now the arc is towards white plains swept clean the erasing of doubt
how to monster what we feared what was invisibility is now too clear
occluded: can you build a big enough cage to hold the rage
one by one escaping is a poor tool for making
you break down the master demos for a moneying
forget the places that etched clay red dust into your soles
you carry around the bullet hole that got away
here dying in dozens and dozens & the ones that get
away, sent away, back & back to Angola
a city is where your life span is 18
a city is where old age for certain men
is a never arriving space

Day 22: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Absolving Distance

once in a once again threaded to an ancient backslide in a gracing, i timbered wishful in small steps a stoning, a remembered where wondered how footprints mark a way out, an exit strategy well rehearsed, a number of poems you can't recall so there is no making up for where you falter, then you retrieve who you once were or in other days you place the lid back on tighter, i couldn't help but daughter, it was contritionless, never having confessed as i was absent on the day of atonement but went down into the confirmation of shapely sins & without reckoning, wanted a god smack the way you speak to yourself before you fall asleep, the way the day rolls on as if we are not pathward to extinction, a plateau of no worries, you slumber in a welling of gentler illusions

Day 21: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Smoke

[frame 1]

between object and open window

morning            barely swiveled

pitcher       jewelry box    pearls    table       chair

woman     water      jug     still   point

bathed sunlight     she merges

resolves    trapped     wedged

map to jut

very neck        ghosts of 

unruffled         trans/mute          

[frame 2] 

still waters

centered     absence      orate       bottles     decor 

gas lights sidewalks      glitz    frenzy       barscape

trapeze sail        chandeliers    women spin    of love

glass thoughts 

Day 20: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"it helps me to imagine I'm still alive" 

-Jean Rhys

"So the heart breaks 

Into small shadows" 

-J. Spicer

"doves exist, dreamers, and dolls

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, and death"

-I. Christensen

Dear Worldling Under Fire

where a new ocean is forming

imagine a continent

i tried to quit 

six seeds summer side 

walked dark version a splitting 

told mother about a break

line the copse in devil's tongue

temporal experiment

don't believe a girl who wanders

isn't asking to be cut 

there is consumption

there is every waking minute

you can't go deep enough

or write it out 

years enough to ever 

make it stop 

you gloss & mute

a gushing wipes the slate clean

wonder these waters 

how we witness their ending

Day 19: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

 Dialectics of Intertextuality

1) That you will be loved or you will not be loved.

2) That you will love someone and they will know it or you will love someone and they will not know it. 

3) That you will be loved by someone and know it or you will be loved by someone and not know it. 

4) That you will love someone and they will love you in return or that you will love someone and they in turn will love someone other than you.

5) That you will love someone and at that time they will love you or that you will love someone and at that time they will not love you. 

6) That you will be loved by someone and at that time you will not love them or that you will be loved by someone and at that time you will love them.

7) That you will be loved conditionally or you will be loved unconditionally.

8) That you will be loved indefinitely or that you will be loved for a definite amount of time. 

9) That you will love conditionally or that you will love unconditionally. 

10) That the love you receive will fill a gap in your self or that it will not.

11) That the love that you give will change another person or that it will not.

12) That the love created between any two people changes the world or that it does not.

13) That the love broken between two people changes the world or that it does not.

14) That you will love all that you are meant to or that you will not.

15) That love comes to the heart by way of the breath which is the line or that it does not.

16) That all love is an afterthought, a memory or that it is not.

17) That love in the world is declining or that it is not. 

18) That we are a successful species because we have learned to love or that we are not.

19) That all love is a performance or that it is not.

20) That love does not exist or that it does.