Dana Kinsey / @wordsbydk @dana.kinsey / is an actor and teacher published in Fledgling Rag, Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Champagne Room, Hive, SWWIM, Wild Roof Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and Prose Online. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press. Visit wordsbyDK.com.
D. Kinsey’s work has been previously featured by In Parentheses.
WE COULD HAVE BEEN BEAUTIFUL
but now I’m back to the slow-working poison of waiting, conjuring someone to arrive in my purple midnight. The man who can go far from me, yet move in me, proof for me that we’ll never be that brand of separate where our blood cools to tepid and he forgets where his hands belong along the curves of me. Believe me when I tell you I would be so very good at becoming the other perfect half of his spell since my mouth can’t stop forming the magical syllables of for*ev*er which I’ve learned not to speak out loud anymore. My eyelashes flicker it in code and I dream it in some hushed amalgamation of Romance languages so only ancient shipwrecks rotting under oceans comprehend it now. O, Jove, I suppose you know writing poems requires slicing thick skin with jagged shells dragged through icy seas. So seize me again, heal me again, leave me again to fend for myself, just on that awful cusp of lonely-enough but still mad for the fluff of love, so I pen a pretty poem to stuff in a corked bottle that bounces like a wild pirate, wends its way to a man who never questions high tide. Salt in his eyes. Or drowning. In me. He’ll dive into Neptune’s rage, rescue my bottled love, realize how deep he’s gone, but not regret it. This man gives over to insistent stars, keeps scouring the shoreline for a sign, and when he washes over me and over me and over me, every god will wink with certainty because we could be beautiful.
WHAT WE TOLD SHAKESPEARE ABOUT TUPAC
He said he wanted to be like you
Be like Lorraine Hansberry too
Said his dreams dried up like Raisins in the Sun
Said the battles he won weren’t worth the days he lost Said he was restless, his scars just itched too much
He said the shiny brains in us needed 2Pacalypse
Said his dreams left stains in us like pomegranate juice
He said “Real eyes realize real lies”
He said he was a seed planted in stone
But swore he’d grown regardless though
He said “I’m not a great romantic, yet I yearn for affection” He said both of you had a predilection for forbidden love He said he’d make the face of heaven finer
He said to cut him out of stars
We know he was Gemini, two halves to his art,
1⁄2 trapped; 1⁄2 empowered; 1⁄2 hungry; 1⁄2 devoured
We know his Panther mama carried him in jail
Did her best to thrust greatness upon him
Brutal violence raged; his pen attacked the cause
Begged us to pause; shot words to shatter worlds;
Will, your melancholy vibe came alive in his thick veins
We know his lullabies cried into dark midnights
Neither of you stayed in school but schooled the world
You’d like his diamond mind, rare and rough and bright
He was the brief candle snuffed like Macbeth and his wife We’ve known “So Many Tears,” no Poetic Justice here
Lift your feather pen, put it in the ink again, cheers to poet men If heaven is heaven, you already wrote a sonnet with him.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8
64 pages, published 4/16/2024
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