On Writing #165 : Megan Burns

Writing as Escape Hatch

Megan Burns

I write to map the world I live in.

I think about codes and analytics a lot.

I think about telepathy and social media.

I write on social media, and I watch patterns there too. My experiences of telepathy, claircognizance and general ability to slip time are closely linked to poetry. I learned how to enhance, to augment and how to use language to experience the world beneath the world, worlds beyond the veil by being a poet first. I tuned my sensitivity to sound and to emotion while standing in front of strangers and reading their emotions as the words drew them up.

I think about quantum theory and ideas stemming from it, about space and time, distance and the effects of distance and action. I don’t write so much as channel now. I meditate a lot, and I listen to the voices in my head. And I write spells to shape the world. And I watch the patterns emerge around me. Poetry now is a type of forecasting but like a dream, you can never be sure of the roles of everyone around you. Divination itself is just an art of reading and being read. So, poets us all.

Sound is sacred enough to heal us. I staked my life on it.

I believe in no separation between all beings and life, and ultimately what we think, make or feel in the world, it is all of us. So I make this.

Mostly I think about hysteria and women’s bodies and how they have suffered. I recognize the enormous privilege I have to be not locked up, murdered, caged, lobotomized and able to have time and energy to create art. I have inside me the memories of burnings: Things done to people who are different, who hear the world different, and who know things they shouldn’t. My friend Bill Lavender says one day we won’t need poetry, because we will have figured out finally how to let go our addiction to suffering. I think until then I’ll keep writing these maps in case I need a way out or in. I’ll keep listening to these voices beyond space or time, and perhaps if I’m good at what I do, I’ll catch the song that frees us just a little bit more.

Love is the only program running.

Megan Burns [photo credit: Susan Schultz] is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She is the co-director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com) and runs The Dragonfly: A Poetry and Performance Healing Space in New Orleans (noladragonfly.com). She has been hosting the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans for the last six years. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has three books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. Her recent chapbooks include: her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016), Beneath the Drift (Red Mare, 2019) and FUCK LOVE: I’m sorry someone hurt you (Shirt Pocket Press, 2019). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018.