Madelyn Musick

Blood Orbit

the house slants, all the fruit sweats & flings, in the humidity
even the kitchen floor tempts me, sometimes I drop a nectarine
& watch it roll down the hall with a velocity, admire its planetary
tilting—
we are two nudes alike, restless, undressed, spun up, off axis,
dearest Venus, this is the kind of night where I want to press
hard on the bruises,
find the soft spot, eat without using my hands
a kind of kissing, overripe honeysuckle down my chin like blood
dripping,         portrait of two women in red—
most nights I would rather see your ghost, would rather
be haunted than alone,
what is force called when you cannot help but do it?
centrifugal? something arising from the body’s inertia
that acts outward, moves around—
I wonder now, how I never understood,
but want to be showed gravity, not held down, but pulled toward,
to the stony center of its red pit, and later like my love,
create an orbit—

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Madelyn Musick is a poet and creative writing instructor with no one home in particular who currently writes in Boston. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina—Wilmington. Her work has been published in Poetry City, USA.