in parentheses

Madelyn Musick is a poet and teacher who writes and shoots film in Boston, MA. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina – Wilmington. Her work has been recently published by Metatron Press, the Somerville Arts Council, The Shore, and others.

Pythagoras
after the musical sculpture by Paul Matisse at the Kendall/MIT train station. Cambridge, MA.

The vertebrae move forward & backward, up
& down, imitating an animal slinking, or a lover,
crawling on their knees toward total surrender.

They call it Pythagoras. The machina of B minor
bells that look like wind chimes suspended above
the subway station, which clang against one another

in exquisite collision, struck by hammers & set
into motion by someone pulling a crank on the
platform. They say the mathematical analysis

of motions is complex, but like falling in & out
of love, anyone can do it with enough intuition.
Though more like poetry, the sculpture hangs

unassuming in a train station, so that when you feel
heartbroken, utterly alone, & most likely to jump
to your death you suddenly hear dissonance, then

resonance that becomes more like music, & for music
everyone looks up & stops to listen. Someone else
is there pulling the crank, making you see the poetry

& for poetry, most rarely refer to it as anything
other than beauty, but like anything made beautiful
from our brokenness there is unity in our ordinary,

remarkable lives, all we have to do to see it is look up.

A Weaker Vessel

My body. My body do what thou wilt, what wont.
My body a hull. My body an uninhabitable climate
for Jesus Christ and His father and His spirit. Though
not without the effort of my childhood heart praying
for Jesus to enter it. To make my body, the lusting flesh
of my unholy temple, pure. That God might use me to
host His spirit, or to be raped by His spirit & forced
to carry its baby. My body which is already dying.
Which is already a metaphor for life itself. Though
susceptible to weakness, to persuasion, to be ruled by
desire, so that Satan might enter it. So that I might eat
the seeds of the pomegranate. My body a fruit tree
for Satan. My body a temptation. My body a possession
of demons. My body a haunting of mothers. My body
a winnowing of blood & pleasure. My body a birthing,
so that He might feast on it, so shalt all men eat of it.

Noah

It was always the awkward love that we made
a secret of, like our late-night coffee at Caffeto’s.
Your favorite spot, a gaudy middle finger
tucked between Uptown and Lyndale Avenue.
Always a club of steampunks and castoffs, goths
and artists, a different grit than the kind I knew,
but I always liked that about you, and I didn’t mind
the dirt, or your need for a seedy honesty, to get out
of a suburban utopia I couldn’t begin to relate to.
So, we met there in the middle, at the cross-section
of our attraction, a dream state, like the red room
in Twin Peaks, you, an unspeakable reverie, and me,
a shining vision crossing a chevron dance floor
toward some great divide, a place between death
and everything else. A depth we both fell into
and out of, but I never asked how you tried to die.
Not over a milkshake or during the half-open mouth
of a movie theater kiss, never with you against my skin,
even when I reached up your sleeves and first felt
the scars you would reopen the next spring.
I just held your hands from across the table.
Our eyes down, seeming reverent, sharing some
silent prayer, and maybe I was, making promises
to the mural of Prince on heavenly clouds, hoping
we could stay alive for each other, hoping
to stay in that dream, even in Caffeto’s where
we could sit out an eternity, staring over black coffee,
sometimes at each other, sometimes into forever.

Love Capacity

here you go, I want to say into the ether,
and breathe out my radiant love for you
into the night, it is still cold enough here
to see the spirits and the sighs of release,
where there is no reason for anger, only
disappointment that we will never climb
a mountain together, never drive to Moab,
kiss the red dirt, never swim topless in the
Aegean sea, make love in the morning
in Greece, maybe I was just imagining
us happily ever after in a photobooth
at a train station in Berlin, eating pastries
and making out in the motel lobby of
forever and ever, and dreamed of how
we would dance outside of every dive-bar
from here to the streets of New Orleans,
tumble in the ocean until we lost our breath
and crawled on our knees to the ends of
the earth, and never tire of one another,
still, I believe I could have adored you
for an eternity, but we will never know
how far down I would have dived for you
had you disappeared from the horizon
on Lake Huron, never know the length,
the depth of my love, my lungs, the capacity

In Parentheses Magazine (Volume 8, Issue 3) Spring 2024

By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8

64 pages, published 4/16/2024

The SPRING 2024 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Published by In Parentheses (Volume 8, Issue 3)