“Who are we but stones / thrown amid leaves?”: C a i r n by J.L. Moultrie – J S Khan
July 13, 2026
J. L. Moultrie’s first chapbook, C a i r n, recently published by Pig Roast Publishing, is not for the faint of heart, with each of its poems marking a signpost through the wilderness of the speaker’s past and present struggles with generational and childhood traumas, which would appear to include mental illness, drug use, and suicidal ideation. And yet, this bleak landscape is ultimately punctuated by sudden, transcendent bursts of romantic devotion and spiritual awe. In this sense, the collection’s one-word title is an apt one, because each poem can be imagined as a cairn, a precarious pile not of disparate jagged rocks but of intentional groupings of words that operate in a similar manner, with imagery and logical subversions evoking a deeply fractured mental state still seeking a way forward through the stabilizing—though equally raw—force of human intimacy. Even the formatting of the title Cairn—its letters aggressively kerned—visually mimics the object that the word names, injecting just enough space between the letters to make it appear precarious and fragile, its structural unity on the verge of dissolution.
The opening poem, “My Body as a Faraway Place,” at once evokes imagery that aligns with the great ancient heresy of Gnosticism, possibly alluding to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, casting a baleful eye on the material body and world to remind us how the soul—at times—screams to be disenfleshed:
Filled with ruins and eventual
happenstance I look for a
way out I dream of ideas
of solace I’m afraid no one
is at the helm I travel the
Earth for my discarded youth
cacophonic silence has taken its
pound of flesh gathering these thoughts
like spilled marbles has left
even the birds out of tune
needling the sky with vacuous intent
By framing the body as a “Faraway Place,” the speaker immediately severs their consciousness from their physical form; they are an alien stranded in the “ruins” of their own biological apparatus. Thus a spatial dynamic is immediately established wherein trauma is not something the speaker experiences externally but rather a ruinous internal landscape that the speaker must “travel.” The expansive spacing in the middle of the poem’s lines further functions as a visual caesura, a deliberate fracture right at the center of the verse that both physically enacts “the ruins” as well as mirrors the mind-body dualism the poem’s imagery conjures.
As with this introductory poem, others that follow similarly prioritize the artist’s chaotic inner emotional world over external reality. The metaphors throughout remain highly abstract but physical, recalling (to this reader, at least) an atmosphere and landscape like a Bosch painting, i.e., “my lungs sprouted cypresses,” there’s a “blackbird’s nest in my chest,” and “in my throat… a skein of swans,” etc. The uneasy preoccupation with the body never fully resolves, as witnessed again in “My Body’s a Single, Tangled Cord or Once Moonshaped,” which—via the use of enjambment and internal rhymes—creates a sensation of entanglement while tracking the speaker’s body from the womb (“…I didn’t tell you / I was nearly aborted…”) through threats of starvation and freezing temperatures. At the same time, this poem explicitly rejects the idea that past traumas are nothing but fleeting memories; rather, they are directly felt residing in the meat and bone of the body, where the “conscious / mind was flesh made whole.”
While a handful of the poems in C a i r n rely on the use of enjambment described above, as well as the juxtaposition of the visceral and the ethereal and a logical subversion of the usual internal/external dichotomy, others—such as “unfurl” and “nox”—discard traditional punctuation and capitalization entirely, relying on a stream-of-consciousness technique that creates a breathless, relentless rhythm to mimic a racing mind—especially one whelmed by an unstoppable flood of memories. Others, like “Memento Mori,” “Notes on Free Will,” and “AMOR FATI OR ANTI-MANIFESTO” go beyond the recollection of familial trauma and memory to incorporate a thematic tension between biological determinism and personal agency. Even if the speaker of the poems would appear to view trauma as something embedded at a cellular level, there is something paradoxical and even liberating about their noting a “germ of ambivalence” that “rests in my genes.” It is perhaps, for this reason, that the speaker of the poems can claim that they “remain wholly capable of anything.”
This vast capacity for “anything” is perhaps most strikingly realized when the chapbook’s dark dreamscape gives way to sudden, overwhelming romantic devotion, notably in “[your heart’s a block of lapis lazuli hidden in snow].” Formatted as a dense, unlineated prose poem devoid of standard punctuation, the text visually mimics the solid “block” of its title. Here, the stream-of-consciousness technique does not channel traumatic memory, but rather a breathless, rushing awe. The poem operates on a stark juxtaposition between the speaker’s self-described “blighted shell” and “toxic mind’s lush with paranoia,” and the pure, stabilizing presence of a partner who brings “silent prayers & refrains of innocence”. It is within this rushing block of text that the speaker’s search for solace is finally answered by human intimacy, transforming physical touch into a spiritual anchor with the confession, “it’s only holy when i hold you & unclothed you”.
On rereading C a i r n a few times, I found myself thinking of the mid-20th century confessionalist poets—think Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell—and especially in how the collection reads like an unflinching exploration of psychological survival in the face of childhood neglect and trauma. Rather than relying on straightforward recollection, the poems in C a i r n rely on disjointed, heavily symbolic imagery, things that grow “into collages inside of / me.” This makes sense, especially as Moultrie has in the past referred to himself as an “abstract expressionist.” Ultimately, C a i r n stands as exactly that: an abstract, deeply confessional monument. Like the precarious stones referenced in its title, the poems that comprise C a i r n are heavily weathered by trauma, yet purposefully stacked to point the reader toward survival. In so doing, Moultrie takes the deepest, most jagged wounds of his confessional past and stacks them into an insecure, yet striking, testament to human endurance.