Memory
The offices merge, and the
dinners and the nights out.
Even, embarrassingly, the aunts
and the children of friends.
But never the sunrises.
Each one mapped distinctly
across my veins
like a new and still-blossoming love.
I’ll make jokes about death. Give names to the bunnies locked between coyote teeth as we walk through the forest with bare feet. Go to your apartment. Drop to the floor. Hide under blankets until the air is too warm. Stick heads out and kiss. Stand up, I’ll watch as the covers shift off, leave you naked. Grab a bottle from the counter. Come back. Take the first sip then pass it to me. I’ll crinkle my face and say no more. But that just means I want you to get a glass of water for me to sip after each pull. You’ll know that.
Play music. Dance with me. Wait till our eyes are clouded just a bit. I’ll look up at you. You’ll look down. The whole world between my nose and yours. Eyes lock. We’ll have to fill the gap. Lace your fingers through my hair. Sit on the ground. Grab the bottle. Continue reading “After the 10th Date by Sam Frost”
A tail can be manufactured
Neoprene, dragon skin silicone, urethane,
flukes customised &
sold to finfolk
lost@sea. Staccato tweets,
eyespots as strange as olives.
At work the dorsal fin separates
easily from the mould.
The mertailor’s apprentice eats.
Knife and fork
reveal flesh as pink as corned beef.
Afterwards, he skims the stock.
(His soup smells good in the pot.)
On weekends she’s a wish in a tank
satisfaction guarranteed,
will do small fry,
Are you real?
(Are you?) Continue reading “Professional Mermaid by Megan Dunn”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
This isn’t an essay. It started life as an essay but then it began to twist & bristle & sprout distinctly unessaylike appendages.
The eyestalks struck me by surprise.
Perhaps it’s an insect or some sort of strange crustacean.
* * * * *
Imagine you find a giant handbag bleating in the corner like a lost lamb. You take it & shake its contents out onto the table.
What do you find?
Take a minute to think about this.
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Snow doesn’t look like the idea of snow, not during a snowstorm. During a snowstorm the sky becomes a void churning with insensate bees, bees that sting & bite. Snowstorms are neither pretty pictures nor charming holiday romps—snowstorms are winter.
Winter unvarnished by the domesticating tendencies of sheltered human eyes.
photos & an experimental essay
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
It’s raining at the moment. Calling it rain might suggest a downpour or perhaps a steadiness of purpose, but this rain is too ambivalent for any of that relative cheeriness. This is slacker rain. This rain drizzles on and off all day, turning the landscape into a listless void. It’s hard to even tell the color of the light in such rain—is it grey, or is it a lurid shade of green?
I’ve never been sure, yet I know it well: as I child I stared out of myriad windows into this rain—into the glistening trees that slouched with waterlogged branches—and tried to imagine the sun. It didn’t work, of course; the rain had seeped into my mental eye. Instead of sunlight, the inside of my skull grew lush with moss. Forests sprang up, haunted by arboriform spirits and carnivorous umbrella monsters. Predatory ferns infected my temporal lobes and burst outwards in Medusa-like fronds, marking me as forever coiled, an absurd Beardsleyan grotesque.
The sun is out of reach. Continue reading “The Fire, the Eclipse, and the Spiders”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
ANB: Autumn begins to pulse from leaf to flavescent leaf, beading—here and there—into cardioid splashes of pomegranate. The hum of the forest alters. Over the hills, in a dilapidated garden choked with honeysuckle vines gone wrong, sunbeams curve down upon a mud-eaten shoe. In places such as these, even saints grow timid.
EC: Currents of light and wind thread a passage. I trail my hands through the leaves, and they come away doused in bergamot, verbena, thyme, traces of care still scattered in this tangled place, death not reversed but charmed into a feral green. I crush rosemary needles between my teeth, think how I must have gone wild too early, trying to possess some other shape. The wind pushes me like a weathervane through the bramble, up to the hollow brink where a house once stood. A granite threshold left sunk in the ground marks where ghosts should step. How can it be the only things that seem real to me now are ruins. Continue reading “An Experimental Conversation with Writer Erin Calabria”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Hello Florence! Thanks so much for agreeing to speak with me here on Burning House Press. I’m fascinated by your bio: you’re a PhD student in physics who also writes poetry. I’ve got to ask, why? What draws you to both physics and poetry?
Hi Amee! Thanks a lot for this opportunity. Oddly enough, the driving force was, & still is, the same in both cases: a thirst for equilibrium, the urge to build an extension upon my collage-like experience of the world; to challenge myself out of my comfort zone, towards areas left uncharted on my maps; to counterbalance an excess of centripetence; to overwrite certainties; to ride a Trojan horse within my own fortress, then to open the gates to cross-pollination.
“my favourite places to roam are borderlands”
Continue reading “An Interview with Physicist and Poet Florence Lenaers”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
I invited poet and artist stephanie roberts — who has poems on Burning House Press and in The Arsonist Magazine — to trade lines of poetry with me. I’d never collaborated with another poet before, so the experience was something of a leap into the unknown. We began emailing poem shreds back and forth. The days flowed by, as did the weeks; the lines formed and shifted. Soon, a poem emerged —
(α) ANB:
Lacewings quake in the crepitation of thistles
& reeds. Crickets creak wintled heartbeats dry.
(β) stephanie roberts:
It would have been perfect, the river remapped boundary;
the embryonic recreates in its image.
Continue reading “a conversation in poetry with stephanie roberts”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
The city was Boise, Idaho. The year was 1995. I was 17 and taking photography classes at Boise State University. While hovering over trays of chemicals in the darkroom one afternoon, I wound up having a three-hour-long conversation with one of my classmates, a gifted artist named Ronny Joe Grooms. Flash forward to 2017. I message my friend Ronny Joe – who goes professionally by the name of Narayan St. Jude – and ask him to join me in photographic conversation for Burning House Press.
He agrees. Continue reading “A Conversation in Photographs with Narayan St. Jude”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Note: Creators, would you like to be interviewed for one of my Burning House Press blog posts? See the details at the end of this post.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
An Interview with Poet Farah Ghafoor
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Farah, welcome! Thanks for speaking to me here on Burning House Press. You’re seventeen and not only an accomplished poet, but also the editor-in-chief of Sugar Rascals, your own literary journal for teens. What is it about poetry that calls to you? What role does it play in your life?
Thanks for having me!
Poetry has always been the perfect outlet for my joy, anger, sorrow, and opinions. It means that I can come home after a long day, usually tired, and turn my emotions into something beautiful, something that other people can enjoy and connect with. A relief from the tedious busyness of life, reading and writing poetry forces me to slow down, spend some time in other people’s brains, and relish in the incredible complexities of language. Though it’s occasionally a little draining, if I don’t write for a week, I start to suffocate with words.
The adventure of poetry really calls to me, too. I love the tough questions, defensive answers, confessions, secrets, glorifications, histories, judgments, and other elements that poems can present in a condensed form. I love how you can control this kind of adventure. I love how you can use language to its limit. I love how this kind of raw, pristine communication is of endless potential. And I love how a poem can truly be anything.
Continue reading “An Interview with Poet Farah Ghafoor” →
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