I feel the weight of nearly a hundred moons upon this suggestive flight deck, overtaken by transfusion in a high formation rhythmic way. Fluorescent headphones—neon red, rotate around neutral zones. Push in, pull out. Swim under the pink, towards some aerobatic link to mother earth. And still, we're not in orbit yet. Your dawning glow you blow into my lungs. Will you catch me if I blast away?

The world we make
Is a safe place to fall from
Spiraling into one another
Our souls orbit like Saturn's moons
Drawn by an irresistible gravity

The world we make
Is a journey most never experience
An adventure full of new discoveries
And unexplained connections
Guiding us toward one another

The world we make
Is familiar and foreign
A home for healing hearts
And building dreams
From the fractured pieces

Broken and beautiful
Raw and rare
Faith and fear
Grace and gratitude
Ours

i am trying to come to terms
with gravity
as i fall toward the floor
with the awareness of the your
face framed in the hall door.
that's an exaggeration—
there's a certain inaccuracy
in conversations about bodies,
personal and celestial, revolutions one around the other,
that is unavoidable due to limitations
of the form. so i like to be precise
where it can fit in between the
cumbersome dances we do.
i'm not falling toward the floor
but i might as well be. i can't tell you that.
what's wrong you ask again
but something i read about planets
is that they're much farther apart than the human mind
can even conceptualize. that most of space is empty
and cold as we dare to spin through it.
i'm thinking of the audacity of revolutions
and you just wanna know why i'm so sad.
i think about bodies. sinew and joints and the red
****** meatstuff that fills in the places in between.
a heart pumping blood and a mouth that refuses to admit it.
about the physicality, the weight of it sinking
into beds that aren't mine, bodies that aren't mine.
you're not standing in the doorway anymore, no one
stands in doorways forever. especially not
for someone who refuses ownership
of the space taken up by their own body. constellations
are outlines of disparate points someone tried to find a
story in. i'm not much better.
i think of heavenly bodies, i think of stars
but they don't tell me anything
i wasn't trying to deal with already.

You are the sun in the solar system,
Somehow pulling everyone into your orbit.
Even passer by asteroids like myself
Get captured and entranced
By the gravitas of your enigma.
Forever stuck in the same trajectory,
Always circling back to you.
How do you do it?

i am not orbit
i am wildman

Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

The night is full of stars. Which still exist?
Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know.
For now I hold your fingers to my lips
and feel their pulse ... warm, palpable and slow ...

once slow to match this reckless spark in me,
this moon in ceaseless orbit I became,
compelled by wilder gravity to flee
night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame ...

for one pale flame that seemed to signify
the Zodiac of all, the meaning of
love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie
in dawning recognition is enough ...

enough each night to bask in you, to know
the face of love ... eyes closed ... its afterglow.

Keywords/Tags: afterglow, stars, suns, planets, zodiac, moon, orbit, gravity, universe, love, radiation, night, exist, existence, time

Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel
where suns revolve around an axle star ...
Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours.
Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel.

Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell?
To see is not to know, but you can feel
the tug sometimes—the gravity, the shell
as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel

toward some draining revelation. Air—
too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp.
The stars invert, electric, everywhere.
And so we fall in spirals through night’s fissure—

two beings—pale, intent to fall forever
around each other—fumbling at love’s tether ...
now separate, now distant, now together.

Published by Poetry Porch/Sonnet Scroll, Poetry Life & Times, Artvilla, Trinacria, The Chained Muse and vzjp.cz (in a Czech translation by Václav Z J Pinkava). Keywords/Tags: free, fall, falling, night, sky, wheel, axle, orbit, gravity, sun, star, moon, planet, satellite, Lethe, air, atmosphere, tether, tethered, umbilical, floating, separate, separation, distance, closeness, nearness, togetherness, attachment

We are never at rest,
even when we take a moment
to get lost inside ourselves.
We are in orbit.

I’ve done my best
to keep pace with the spin,
adapting to the life
in constant change around me.

One day you came
through the fog I was navigating.
Cold, gray monotony
turning prismatic before me.

Still I knew,
the spin doesn't pause.
I just hope you find a way
to be the thing that lasts.

They drift, as do we, to and fro following the path drawn by the gods. Frozen in action, their pulling force, infinitely they orbit endlessly they fall. Opposing domains, night and day, mutually reliant by the recognition of the other. For if not for the sun dark would not be day. If not for the moon light would be night. A perpetual blaring of one reality. A world locked to a state. When then would the angels walk? Would the devils scour the Earth? It is the contesting force of day and night which defines the hells as dark and the heavens as light. The billion year dance, the age old fight. It is the moon to which we owe our morning, and the sun to which we owe our night. Around they dance, in perpetuity.