A Friend’s Reflection after Bad Tinder Date #38

A poem by Dana Kinsey

A Friend’s Reflection after Bad Tinder Date #38

We could have been beautiful, but now I’m back to the slow-working poison of waiting, conjuring someone to saunter up to the counter of 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 say 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 say out loud anymore. My eyelashes flicker it in code. I dream it in black & white and some hushed amalgamation of Romance languages so only ancient shipwrecks rotting under oceans comprehend it now. O, Jove, I suppose you know writing 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. This man surrenders his last coins to bribe reluctant stars, scour the shorelines for signs. He’ll dive straight into Neptune’s rage, rescue my bottled magic, realize how deep he’s gone, but not regret it, and when he finally washes over me, and over me, and over me, every god will wink with certainty because they know we could be beautiful.

About the author: Dana Kinsey is an actor and teaching artist published in Fledgling Rag, Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Sledgehammer Lit, Hive, Streetcake, West Trestle Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Viewless Wings, The Champagne Room, Star 82 Review, Hive, SWWIM, Wild Roof Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, Prose Online, and more. Her poem “Show Me, Earth, Your Day," was a finalist in 2023 at Sweet Lit. Dana's play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press and was selected as a “Best Dressed” feature for The Wardrobe at Sundress Publications. Visit wordsbyDK.com.